Aug 6 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump plans to sign two executive orders on Thursday aimed at denying citizenship to children born in the United States because of commercial “birth tourism”, Axios reported.
Trump is also seeking to deny birthright citizenship for children born of some foreign diplomatic staff in the U.S. and, potentially, U.S. territories in the future, according to Axios.
Trump’s itinerary shows he has a “signing time” event at the Oval Office on Thursday, which had not begun as of 4:05 pm (2005 GMT), about an hour and five minutes past the time slot in the official schedule released by the White House.
Limiting birthright citizenship has been one of the top priorities in the Republican president’s crackdown on immigration.
An earlier effort by Trump was rejected by the Supreme Court in June, prompting him to call upon Congress to act.
No U.S. law outright bars birth tourism, but a federal regulation implemented in 2020 during Trump’s first term prohibits using temporary tourist and business visas for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a newborn. People who engage in birth tourism schemes could be prosecuted for fraud or other related crimes.
There are no official figures tallying the number of foreigners who come to the U.S. for the explicit purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their children, or the cost to taxpayers.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration, estimated in an analysis in 2020 that between 20,000-25,000 mothers came to the U.S. for birth tourism in a year-long period between 2016-2017.
There were 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2025.
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke, Ryan Patrick Jones and Ismail Shakil; editing by Michelle Nichols and David Ljunggren)
