The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration, including one limiting the number of people eligible for U.S. citizenship after being born in the United States, while another focused on stopping people from coming to the U.S. to give birth.
The written executive order released later Thursday was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.
It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship."
A second order seeks to curb what Trump called “birth tourism” by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.
It was not immediately clear how successful the president's most recent attempt to restrict birthright citizenship would be. Trump said he thought his latest actions would be constitutional and his drive to reopen the question reflected the administration's zeal to restrict who gets to become an American.
“I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it and we’re ending it a different way,” Trump said.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s previous efforts to declare that children born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily aren’t American citizens, and upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship.
