immigration, trump, supreme court, birthright citizenship

After the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, the Trump administration's next move was to try to bar pregnant women from setting foot in the country.

"If you have birthright citizenship, it means if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go look around at some things, in a couple of weeks that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen and a direct line into American cash and welfare for the rest of that child's life."

— Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, on Fox News, July 1, 2026

The Supreme Court spoke on Tuesday. In a 6-3 decision, it did what many expected: it reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship. The text of the amendment is unambiguous. "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." The Court held that President Trump's executive order attempting to end that practice was unconstitutional.

The reaction from the White House was swift. Within hours, the administration began laying out Plan B: if it cannot end birthright citizenship, it will try to stop pregnant women from entering the country altogether.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared on "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday and discussed whether immigrant women should be subject to pregnancy screening at ports of entry. His co-host, Brian Kilmeade, suggested the government could tell women who are "eight and a half months pregnant, maybe you shouldn't get on that plane." Mullin agreed the administration could "take a look at" restricting such travel, saying it might "cause a health issue."

Neither Mullin nor the Fox panel explained how pregnancy would be determined. Would women be required to take a pregnancy test before boarding a flight? Would airlines be forced to screen passengers? Mullin offered a clue: "You're not going on vacation in an emergency in late-term pregnancy."

Translation: the plan is to subject women to biological scrutiny at the border, under the guise of health and safety, for the explicit purpose of preventing them from having American children.

The numbers driving this panic are almost comically small. The CDC estimates that about 9,000 of the 3.5 million babies born in 2024 were to foreign-born mothers. That is 0.26 percent of all U.S. births. The more generous estimates from the Center for Immigration Studies put the number of so-called "birth tourists" at 70,000 annually. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute puts it at up to 26,000.

For context, 3.6 million children are born in the United States every year. The entire "crisis" amounts to a fraction of a single hospital's annual deliveries.

The rhetoric from Republican leaders has been unrestrained. Representative Andy Ogles announced he would introduce the "Anchors Away Act," a bill designed to make pregnant foreign nationals inadmissible to the United States. On X, he wrote: "SCOTUS betrayed America. It's time to bar pregnant foreigners from coming to this country. We are being colonized."

Representative Lauren Boebert called for the State Department to "IMMEDIATELY cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants. Sorry, Birth Tourism cannot continue."

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference on Wednesday that "birth tourism is a booming industry" and that other agencies could "minimize or limit the opportunity of folks coming here, not to visit, not to do what they're saying they're doing on their tourist visa, but just to have a baby."

Sen. Rick Scott wrote on X: "We need to make sure illegal aliens don't come into our country and EXPLOIT our immigration system. That means closing EVERY. SINGLE. LOOPHOLE."

Trump himself congratulated Chinese President Xi Jinping on the "massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!" implying that the babies born on U.S. soil to foreign mothers were predominantly Chinese.

The historical lineage of this panic is instructive. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War. It was specifically designed to affirm the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, who had been legally considered property under the Dred Scott decision. The amendment was a response to a government that had declared Black Americans not citizens.

Now, a Republican administration is trying to strip that citizenship from the descendants of immigrants, and when the Court said no, it decided to target the mothers instead.

This is not the first time the right has tried to attack birthright citizenship through biological policing. Republicans at the state and local level have pushed genital inspections of young children in recent years, arguing that such searches would prevent transgender people from participating in school sports. On Tuesday, the same Supreme Court upheld those state-level anti-transgender measures.

The through-line is unmistakable: when the Constitution gets in the way of policy objectives, the response is to find a way around it, to invent new categories of people who deserve less protection, and to deploy the machinery of the state to sort them out.

What makes the pregnancy screening proposal particularly sinister is what it would require in practice. The U.S. would need a system to determine which incoming travelers are pregnant. This means either mandatory testing at ports of entry, or reliance on visual assessment by border agents, or both. It means women of childbearing age from certain countries would be subjected to intimate questioning, possibly invasive procedures, all because the government decided their reproductive capacity was a national security threat.

The Cato Institute, which is hardly a champion of open borders, has already flagged that the 100-mile enforcement zone from any U.S. border covers more than 213 million Americans and operates as a "Constitution-free zone." Interior immigration checkpoints have been expanding, with ICE paying state and local police millions to help staff them. One estimate says the total spending on these domestic immigration enforcement programs could hit $2 billion this year alone.

Add pregnancy screening to the mix, and you have a system in which the federal government can stop your car, demand your papers, and screen your body, all within the continental United States, with no connection to any actual international border.

Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California who was born to Mexican immigrants on U.S. soil, captured the stakes: "This is certainly not the end of Trump's attacks on our Constitution, our democracy, and the notion of what it means to be an American."

He was right. The Supreme Court ruled on birthright citizenship. The administration's response was to treat the women who would exercise that right as the enemy. The Constitution says you cannot take away the citizenship of someone born on American soil. So the administration's workaround is to try to prevent those people from being born here at all.

The question is not whether this is extreme. The question is why anyone is surprised that a government which tried to end birthright citizenship by executive order would next try to end it by pregnancy test.