(CNN) — President Donald Trump is taking another swing at limiting so-called birth tourism and birthright citizenship, citing a “very unfortunate decision” in the Supreme Court this year that struck down his earlier attempt to curb birthright citizenship.
He signed executive orders on the subject Thursday, which appear to largely tighten laws already in place and narrow recognized exceptions.
It’s a seemingly more limited attempt compared to an executive order Trump signed last year that sought to broadly end the right for children born in the country to people who are not US citizens. The Supreme Court rejected that effort in June, citing the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
“We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday.
One of the executive orders signed by Trump Wednesday targets “alien enemies,” members of foreign terrorist organizations and categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments — making children born to people in those groups ineligible for birthright citizenship, said White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policies.
The second executive order focuses on so-called birth tourism, which has been a focal point for immigration hawks. US law already bans people from obtaining a visa “for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States.”
Miller described the executive order as a ban on birth tourism, though it’s unclear how it would advance what is already in US code.
Axios first reported on the executive actions.
The Supreme Court’s decision on June 30 included a full-throated defense of birthright citizenship as it has been understood in the United States for more than a century. Children born on American soil, the court ruled, are US citizens even if their parents are in the country illegally or temporarily.
A five-justice majority held that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that right, over dissents from conservative justices who complained that the decision did nothing to stop the kind of birth tourism Trump initially targeted.
A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, concluded that Trump’s initial executive order limiting birthright citizenship was barred by federal law rather than the 14th Amendment.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, wrote for the court. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
The court has long recognized some exceptions to the rule, and it did so again in its blockbuster decision this summer. But those are limited to children born to diplomats and “enemies” during a “hostile occupation.”
Still, several members of the court’s conservative wing complained at the time that the June 30 decision would allow the kind of birth tourism Trump was concerned about.
“The court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent. “Today, the court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens.”
That opinion was joined by only one other member of the court: Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“As interpreted by the court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a solo dissent.
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