On June 30th, the Supreme Court struck down the president’s birthright citizenship order 6–3 in Trump v. Barbara, with Chief Justice Roberts writing that children born to parents unlawfully or temporarily present here are citizens at birth. Six weeks later, two new executive orders arrived — one narrowing who qualifies for birthright citizenship, one titled “Ending Birth Tourism.”
Host Lauren Clarke is joined by Jack Chin, the Edward L. Barrett Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis and one of the country’s leading scholars on the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, to pull the two orders apart. Why the citizenship order likely fails where it stretches the “closed set” of exceptions the Court recognized. Why the birth tourism order may survive unchallenged — and why it’s still, in Chin’s words, a solution in search of a problem, aimed at an estimated 20,000–26,000 births out of 3.6 million a year.
Plus: what this means at the consulate for pregnant applicants and women of childbearing age who aren’t birth tourists at all, where consular non-reviewability leaves them, and how to build a visa package that heads the question off.
First, EIG partner Rob Taylor covers the week’s news: a proposal to eliminate the 60-day grace period, USCIS denials without RFEs, mandatory e-filing, a proposed N-400 fee hike, 175,000+ visa revocations since January 2025, and stepped-up H-1B enforcement.
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