The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center said Monday it hasn’t yet gotten many calls about new federal executive orders taking aim at birthright citizenship.
The new orders from the Trump administration try to limit people’s ability to travel to the U.S. to give birth, and, if people do make that trip, to block birthright citizenship from applying.
President Donald Trump describes them as protecting American citizenship.
“Citizenship is not a commodity to be acquired through calculated exploitation and evasion of the immigration laws, such as by entering the United States on a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth within the Nation’s borders,” one of his orders says.
The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
A previous executive order restricting birthright citizen, which Trump issued shortly after taking office in January 2025, was declared unconstitutional earlier this summer by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Michigan Immigrant Rights Center spokesperson Christine Sauvé predicts the new orders will face a similar challenge.
“In short, for what this means for people in Michigan, nothing changes right now. But we’ll be watching for litigation against these attempts,” Sauvé said.
Had the first order gone into effect, it would have denied birthright citizenship to children of people in this country without legal permission. Children of people here legally with temporary visas, like for work or travel, would have also been blocked from citizenship.
Trump’s new executive orders carve a narrower scope to get around the court’s majority opinion.
“This order identifies, non-exhaustively, and prescribes action concerning certain categories of children of aliens who do not fall within the rule of birthright citizenship as announced by the Supreme Court,” a new order from Trump reads.
Besides taking aim at children of people traveling to the country to give birth, the order seeks to also deny citizenship to kids where “either parent of that person is an alien enemy.” The order references members of foreign terrorist organizations or specifically designated global terrorists.
But Sauvé worries that could be interpreted widely to include various perceived enemies of the Trump, if allowed to remain in place. Even though she doesn’t believe anything immediately will change, she shared concerns about what the attempts to renegotiate birthright citizenship could mean culturally.
“What is changing and what has changed is how our government, particularly this federal administration, is thinking about people who want to build a life in the United States and who is American and who belongs here. That, I think weighs heavy on all of us,” Sauvé said.
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