The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on April 1, 2026, in a case tied to President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to limit automatic birthright citizenship for certain U.S.-born children, including those born to parents who are in the country unlawfully or who lack permanent legal status. The dispute has also fueled renewed attention on “birth tourism,” a practice critics say can involve visa fraud, though giving birth in the United States is not illegal in itself.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., recently framed the debate as a fraud and national-security concern, pointing to “birth tourism” — a controversial practice in which pregnant travelers come to the United States to give birth so their child will be a U.S. citizen.
Experts interviewed by NPR said the core legal question in the Supreme Court case is about birthright citizenship itself, but the public debate often centers on whether existing law already gives the government tools to address fraud. Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told NPR that birth tourism can involve “occasional incidents of fraud,” but argued that it can be addressed through enforcement of current law rather than by revisiting the 14th Amendment.
Federal officials have previously investigated and prosecuted birth-tourism operations that, according to NPR’s reporting, have charged clients large sums and sometimes coached them to conceal the purpose of travel — conduct that can run afoul of U.S. immigration rules if a visitor misrepresents the purpose of a trip.
The Trump administration has also pointed to executive-branch authority over visas. NPR reported that during Trump’s first term, the State Department revised guidance in 2020 to make it harder to obtain tourist visas when officials believed the primary purpose of the visit was to give birth in the United States, and a 2022 report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs said the change made it more difficult for birth-tourism companies to continue operating.
Supporters of keeping existing birthright-citizenship rules note that U.S. policy has long been shaped by the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and Supreme Court precedent interpreting it. Legal scholars commonly trace the modern understanding to the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
The scale of birth tourism is disputed, and estimates vary widely. NPR’s reporting cited competing figures, including government-recorded counts of births linked to non-U.S. addresses and a higher estimate from the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration levels.
Some national-security arguments rely on hypotheticals rather than documented cases. Andrew Badger, a defense intelligence analyst and co-author of a book on Chinese espionage, told NPR he could imagine a foreign government trying to take advantage of U.S. citizenship rules, but he did not cite specific confirmed cases in which U.S.-born children of birth tourists were used as operatives. David Bier of the Cato Institute, which generally supports freer immigration, told NPR he has not found terrorism cases fitting that scenario in the data he reviewed.
The Supreme Court argument is scheduled for April 1, 2026, according to SCOTUSblog’s case preview.
