American parents applying for passports for U.S.-born children could eventually face additional citizenship scrutiny under a proposed State Department policy aimed in part at combating so-called “birth tourism.”
The draft guidance would require parents or legal guardians to document their own U.S. citizenship or immigration status, potentially allowing passport officials to examine whether a child’s birth falls under exceptions targeted by the Trump administration’s revised birthright citizenship policy. The proposal could significantly change how some passport applications for children born on U.S. soil are reviewed, although its future is uncertain after a federal judge on Wednesday blocked enforcement of the executive order behind the policy.
Passport applications could require proof of parents’ status
Under the proposal, parents and legal guardians seeking U.S. passports for their children would have to provide documents establishing their own citizenship or immigration status, according to draft State Department guidance reviewed by Reuters.
The department would “require parental information and evidence of parental citizenship or immigration status” to determine whether a child falls under President Donald Trump’s Aug. 6 Executive Order 14418, according to the draft cited by Reuters.
For U.S. citizens, acceptable evidence could include a valid American passport or birth certificate. Noncitizens could be asked to provide documents such as a permanent resident card or an I-94 arrival/departure record. The requirement would apply when a parent or legal guardian submits a passport application on behalf of a child, Reuters reported.
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That would add a new step for many families with children born in the United States. Under existing procedures, parents generally prove the child’s U.S. birth and their relationship to the child while presenting their own photo identification. Although passport forms ask about the parents’ citizenship, supporting documentation of each parent’s citizenship or immigration status is not normally required for a U.S.-born child, Reuters reported.
The State Department’s own current visa guidance states that, “With few exceptions, a person born in the United States acquires U.S. citizenship at birth,” and says a state-issued birth certificate can serve as evidence of that citizenship.
The proposed system could therefore turn a child’s passport application into an additional citizenship checkpoint: passport officials would potentially consider not only where the child was born, but also the legal circumstances surrounding the parents at the time of birth.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott defended the administration’s broader approach, telling Reuters that Trump had been clear that his government would “protect the meaning and value of American citizenship.” Pigott said the passport adjudication process would be expected to reflect that standard.
The proposed guidance has not been formally implemented, and a new court ruling has placed a significant obstacle in its path.
Federal judge blocks order behind proposed passport checks
The passport proposal stems from Executive Order 14418, one of two orders Trump signed Aug. 6 after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier, broader attempt to restrict birthright citizenship.
Trump’s original 2025 order sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States when neither parent was a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident and the parents were unlawfully or temporarily present. The Supreme Court rejected that policy in June in Barbara v. Trump, ruling 6-3 that the affected U.S.-born children were citizens under the 14th Amendment.
The administration responded with a narrower order identifying specific categories it argues fall outside constitutional birthright citizenship protections, including some children of foreign government personnel, people classified as “alien enemies” and parents involved in fraud or commercial arrangements intended to obtain U.S. citizenship for a child.
On Sept. 2, however, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction preventing federal agencies from enforcing the new order against children covered by an existing class-action lawsuit.
“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” Boardman wrote in her ruling. She concluded that the Aug. 6 order was “almost certainly unconstitutional” as applied to those children.
Boardman said the Supreme Court’s earlier decision controlled the case regardless of how the administration attempted to redefine the exceptions through another executive order.
“No Presidential Executive Order can undo what the Supreme Court has done,” she wrote.
The injunction bars agencies including the State Department and Department of Homeland Security from denying or interfering with the citizenship of children covered by the class action. Importantly, however, Boardman did not prevent federal agencies from continuing to prepare guidance explaining how they would implement Trump’s order should the administration ultimately prevail in court. That leaves the proposed passport rules alive as an administrative plan, even though their underlying citizenship restrictions currently cannot be enforced against the protected class.
The White House maintains that the new order was deliberately written to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told The Washington Post that the executive order is “consistent with the holdings and analysis set forth by the Supreme Court.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche also indicated that the administration intends to continue defending the policy and could take the dispute back to the high court.
“We’ll continue to fight,” Blanche told Fox News, adding that “if we have to go back to the Supreme Court, we will.”
Birth tourism becomes focus of citizenship fight
At the center of the administration’s narrower strategy is what it calls “birth tourism” — foreign nationals entering the United States on nonimmigrant visas primarily to give birth so their children acquire U.S. citizenship.
A separate Aug. 6 executive order, Executive Order 14419, directed the State and Homeland Security departments to step up enforcement against the practice, including by denying or revoking visas and travel authorization in qualifying cases.
“Citizenship is not a commodity to be acquired through calculated exploitation and evasion of the immigration laws,” Trump declared in the order. The White House accused birth-tourism businesses of helping foreign clients conceal the real purpose of their travel and arranging stays in the United States for women planning to give birth.
The State Department subsequently created a task force targeting birth tourism and said it was coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security to investigate abuse of nonimmigrant visas. The department cited cases in which travelers allegedly claimed they were entering for vacations before giving birth shortly after arriving and having their visas revoked. “This is only the beginning,” the State Department said.
The government was already able to deny visitor visas for birth tourism before the new executive orders. State Department policy adopted in 2020 instructs consular officers to deny B visas when they have reason to believe an applicant’s primary purpose for traveling to the United States is to give birth in order to obtain citizenship for a child. Current State Department guidance continues to state that birth tourism “is not a permissible basis for issuance of a visitor visa.”
What remains disputed is the scale of the practice and whether suspected birth tourism can affect the constitutional citizenship of a child after the child has already been born in the United States.
Trump estimated when announcing the new policy that the number of cases was in the “hundreds of thousands,” according to the Associated Press (AP). There is no official federal estimate of how many U.S. births qualify as birth tourism, however. AP reported that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showed nearly 9,600 children were born in 2024 to foreign mothers whose official address was outside the United States, while the Center for Immigration Studies has estimated roughly 20,000 to 26,000 birth tourists enter the country annually. Neither figure establishes how many women entered specifically to obtain citizenship for a child.
“The hundreds of thousands just seems like an overestimate,” Migration Policy Institute associate policy analyst Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh told AP, pointing to the limited available data.
The emerging passport policy would take the administration’s campaign beyond screening travelers before they enter the United States. It could allow the State Department to examine a parent’s immigration status and circumstances after a child has been born when determining whether to issue that child a U.S. passport.
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