President Donald Trump is once again testing the boundaries of executive power on immigration with two new executive orders that are expected to face legal challenges.
The new orders are significantly narrower than Trump's previous attempt to limit birthright citizenship, which ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The first order seeks to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are legally working in the country but have ties to a foreign embassy or are considered an "alien enemy." The second targets so-called "birth tourism," aiming to prevent automatic citizenship for children born to women whom the administration believes traveled to the United States primarily to give birth.
The Trump administration argues the orders are legally justified. However, legal experts contend they violate the Constitution.
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The American Civil Liberties Union, which successfully challenged Trump's earlier effort to restrict birthright citizenship, called the new orders another attempt to undermine the Constitution.
"This executive order, its attempt to rewrite the constitutional rules, this kind of idea of whack-a-mole, we're going to keep trying until, you know, the president gets to decide who's a citizen," said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "That's fundamentally flawed. The whole point of the citizenship clause of the Constitution was to take the power of deciding who is a birthright citizen out of the hands of presidents, out of the hands of Congress, and put it safely in the Constitution where it belongs."
Wofsy also expressed confidence that the ACLU would prevail if the orders are challenged in court.
The executive orders also renew debate over the scope of birth tourism.
During remarks in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump claimed that "hundreds of thousands" of women travel to the United States each year to give birth so their children can obtain U.S. citizenship. However, that figure has been disputed.
During arguments before the Supreme Court earlier this year, even the administration's solicitor general did not provide a specific estimate when asked about the scale of the practice.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 26,000 of the more than 3.5 million babies born in the United States each year are born to women who entered the country on tourist visas.
