The State Department of the United States on Tuesday announced it has established a task force to end “birth tourism,” or the practice of traveling to a country to give birth there, escalating President Trump’s campaign and against birthright citizenship, the constitutional right granting American citizenship to babies born in the United States.
“As President Trump has made clear, citizenship is not a commodity to be acquired through the calculated exploitation of U.S. immigration laws,” the State Department said in a statement.
“The Department of State is working closely with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to combat birth tourism and protect the integrity of the U.S. immigration system.”
The State Department’s establishment of a task force comes after Trump signed two executive orders on Aug. 6 attempting to limit birthright citizenship. The president’s executive order came after the Supreme Court on June 30 struck down Trump’s first attempt to limit citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to parents who are not American citizens.
The Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force is meant to review activities of visa holders “worldwide,” the State Department said, to identify instances of the practice and take action to revoke visas of those who engage in or facilitate it, and it will work to dismantle the networks that profit from such schemes.
The State Department said it is analyzing and “connecting information held across the Department and other federal agencies,” including the Department of Homeland Security, to identify whether visa holders are looking to give birth in the U.S.
The task force has revoked more than 600 visas from foreign nationals related to the practice, the State Department said.
The taskforce is endorsed by Trump’s second executive order signed on Aug. 6, titled “Ending Birth Tourism.”
The order “delegates presidential authorities to the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security and directs them to halt the practice of birth tourism.”
The order defined “birth tourism” as the entry of a foreign national into the U.S. via a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on American soil, or as any effort by a foreign national to facilitate the entry of a foreign national into the U.S. via a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S.
Trump’s other executive order, titled “Continuing To Protect The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship,” identifies “non-exhaustively” certain categories of children who do not qualify for birthright citizenship.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the successful class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration that was decided in June by the Supreme Court, has come out against Trump’s executive orders.
The ACLU called for a federal judge in New Hampshire, where its case was first filed, “to make it unquestionably clear that the citizenship of babies covered by that class-action lawsuit is protected despite this new executive order.”
