22.33 CESTTrump signs new executive orders to deny US citizenship to children born to so-called “birth tourists”One month after the United States supreme court struck down his first attempt to restrict the guarantee of birthright citizenship enshrined in the US constitution, Donald Trump signed executive orders on Thursday that aim to deny US citizenship to children born in the United States to so-called “birth tourists”.The orders, which have not yet been made public, apparently expand the definitions of children the White House deems ineligible for birthright citizenship and seek to ban “birth tourism”, which the president claimed on Thursday is practiced by “hundreds of thousands” of people.That seems like a wildly inflated estimate. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate “puts birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on US soil, although government data show just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.”For context, it seems worth keeping in mind that Trump’s own father, Fred Trump, was born a US citizen in 1905 to a non-citizen mother who arrived in New York from Germany six months pregnant. The president’s Scottish-born mother, Mary Anne Trump, later gave birth to her first two children, the current president’s older siblings, in the US before becoming a US citizen herself.A file photo of Donald Trump with his parents, Fred and Mary Anne Trump. Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./AlamyShareUpdated at 22.50 CEST
