The president Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday titled «Ending Birth Tourism» that authorizes the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security to take action against foreigners who enter or attempt to enter the United States with a non-immigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on U.S. soil.
The government may deny visas, revoke travel authorizations, permanently prohibit entry, and expel individuals associated with what is known as maternity tourism.
The text of the executive order published by the White House states that "citizenship is not a commodity that can be obtained through calculated exploitation and evasion of immigration laws, as occurs when entering the country on a non-immigrant visa with the purpose of giving birth within its borders."
The measure also targets the facilitators of the scheme: operators, organizations, and individuals—both inside and outside the United States—who assist in coordinating these trips.
According to the document, these operators "use misleading advertising and incentives to entice foreigners to travel to the United States for the purpose of giving birth on American soil," promising citizenship, access to public benefits, and stays in specialized facilities, promises that they often do not fulfill.
The order also states that the operators "instruct their clients to misrepresent the purpose and duration of their trip to consular and border officials" in order to obtain entry visas.
Officials from the White House specified that tourist visas "can, must, and will be denied" when the stated purpose is birth tourism.
The regulation includes humanitarian or national interest exceptions at the discretion of the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, and delegates to both officials the presidential authority established in section 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to implement the order.
The measure is part of a strategy different from the one Trump attempted in January 2025, when he signed Executive Order 14160 to reinterpret the 14th Amendment and deny automatic citizenship to children of non-citizens.
That order was blocked by a federal judge from its very first hours, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the block months later.
The definitive blow came on June 30, 2026, when the Supreme Court overturned that order by a vote of six to three, reaffirming the constitutionally guaranteed right to citizenship by birth.
In light of that judicial defeat, Trump's new strategy does not directly challenge birthright citizenship itself, but rather the entry mechanism: by acting on non-immigrant visas, the Executive exercises broader discretion that is harder to challenge in court.
The State Department had already warned in June 2026 that it could deny visas to pregnant women whose primary purpose was to give birth in the United States, and at the beginning of August, the country also tightened access to tourist visas with stricter requirements for certain countries.
The birth tourism industry mainly caters to clients from China, Russia, Nigeria, and Latin American countries, including Cuba.
Estimates presented to the U.S. Senate place the annual number of cases between 50,000 and 150,000 just among Chinese nationals, while the Center for Immigration Studies estimates about 36,000 global cases per year.
This order was signed on the same day as a second executive order related to birthright citizenship, both introduced by the White House as part of the effort to "protect the meaning and value of American citizenship."
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