Two executive orders were signed in the Oval Office on Thursday, and between them they do something the Church has a very old and very specific objection to. They sort newborn babies into groups according to what the babies’ parents are. A child born tomorrow morning in an American hospital will be a citizen or not depending on whether his mother is classed as an alien enemy, or works for a foreign government, or paid somebody to arrange the trip. The child himself is identical in every case. He weighs seven pounds and he cannot hold his own head up. What changes is the file on his parents.

The News Story

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders in the Oval Office on Thursday, August 6, aimed at restricting birthright citizenship and halting what his administration calls “birth tourism,” five weeks after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier and broader attempt to limit automatic citizenship for children born in the United States.

The first order, “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” identifies categories of children born to non-citizen parents whom the administration says are not entitled to birthright citizenship, which the White House describes as consistent with historical exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court. According to the White House fact sheet and reporting by TIME, the covered categories include children with at least one parent who is an “alien enemy,” a foreign government employee working in the United States on behalf of that government, or a person who “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship.” The order also restricts birthright citizenship for children born to non-citizen parents in a U.S. territory or territorial waters where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute, such as American Samoa. Children of foreign diplomats were already excluded under existing law, and major territories including Puerto Rico and Guam confer citizenship by statute.

The second order, “Ending Birth Tourism,” delegates presidential authorities to the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security and directs them to create rules preventing foreign nationals from entering the country to give birth, and to remove such persons if necessary.

The actions follow the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in Trump v. Barbara, in which the justices voted 6-3 to strike down the executive order Trump signed on the first day of his second term. That order had declared that children born in the United States without at least one citizen or lawful permanent resident parent were not automatically citizens. It was blocked by several lower courts and never took effect. The Court held it could not be reconciled with the 14th Amendment, ruling that the Constitution extends citizenship to children born to parents in the United States “for whom no extraterritorial fiction applie[s].”

“It was close, but a very, very unfortunate decision,” Trump said Thursday of the ruling. “So we’re making adjustments because it’s very unfair.” Asked whether the new orders would survive constitutional scrutiny, he said, “I think it will.” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said at the signing that visitors “come here pretending to be a tourist” when “the real reason they’re here is to have a child.”

Federal data show fewer than 10,000 U.S. births in 2024 to mothers listing foreign addresses. The Migration Policy Institute puts census-based estimates at 22,000 to 26,000 births annually, against roughly 3.6 million total U.S. births in 2025, and has described birth tourism as rare relative to the attention it receives.

Legal challenges are expected. “The Supreme Court already decided this issue: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution,” said Cody Wofsy of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution.” Sens. Alex Padilla and Ruben Gallego also objected publicly. Some immigration observers have said the June ruling did not necessarily foreclose further litigation on narrower categories. Additional implementation details were not provided. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

What The Orders Actually Sort

Start with the mechanism, because the mechanism is where the moral question lives. Neither order changes anything about the child. The child is born the same way in every case, on the same soil, in the same hospital, with the same lungs and the same immortal soul. The variable is entirely external to him. Somebody else did something, or belongs to something, or paid somebody, and that fact is then applied to the newborn as a legal disability he will carry for the rest of his life.

That structure has a name in the older moral vocabulary. It is imputation, the transfer of one person’s liability onto another person. And Scripture is blunt about it in a way that modern policy language is not: “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20).

The child does not inherit his father’s paperwork. He inherits his father’s eyes and maybe his father’s temper. His standing before God is his own from the first second, and the Church’s whole social teaching is a long argument that his standing before the state has to answer to that.

The Person Comes First, And The State Comes After

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is the Church’s own organized synthesis of everything she teaches about society, puts the sequence in a single line that governs this entire question. The rights and duties of the person “constitute an objective norm on which positive law is based and which cannot be ignored by the political community, because both in existential being and in final purpose the human person precedes the political community.” [13]

Read that ordering carefully. The person is first in existence and first in purpose. The political community shows up second, and it shows up to serve the person who was already there. A government finds persons already made and already owed things, and its whole job on this point is to write those things down accurately in the law.

The Compendium then says where rights actually come from, and it names the exact error worth naming this week: “The ultimate source of human rights is not found in the mere will of human beings, in the reality of the State, in public powers, but in man himself and in God his Creator.” [14] These rights are, in the document’s three words, “universal, inviolable, inalienable.” [14]

An executive order is the will of a public power. It is a legitimate instrument and it does real work. But the moment it starts deciding which newborns are entitled to what, on grounds having nothing to do with those newborns, it has quietly assumed a competence the Church says no government has. The power a state holds here is the power to recognize, and it stops there.

The Family Is Not A Government Program

There is a second, less-quoted line in the Compendium that lands squarely on a policy built out of parental categories. Speaking of the family, the document says: “The family possesses inviolable rights and finds its legitimization in human nature and not in being recognized by the State. The family, then, does not exist for society or the State, but society and the State exist for the family.” [15]

Consider what these orders do to that. A mother and father who arrived on a visitor’s visa, or who work for a foreign ministry, or who are classed as enemies of the United States, are still a family. The Church has never held that a family’s legitimacy runs through the immigration file. And these orders reach through the file and out the other side, landing on a child who is inside that family and nowhere else.

The Compendium is also plain that in dealing with the family, the state is bound by subsidiarity: public authorities “may not take away from the family tasks which it can accomplish well by itself,” and they have a positive duty “to sustain the family.” [15] Sustaining a family and starting that family’s newest member off as a person with no country are hard to hold in the same hand.

The Word Is “Every”

Now to the strongest thing the Church says about children, and it is stronger than most Catholics realize. The Compendium teaches that “the Church’s social doctrine constantly points out the need to respect the dignity of children,” and it quotes the demand for “a great respect and generous concern for their rights.” Then it adds a clause that does not permit exceptions: “This is true for every child, but it becomes all the more urgent the smaller the child is and the more it is in need of everything.” [16]

Every child. The sentence carries no qualifier about citizenship, about the parents, about whose file is in order. And notice the direction the urgency runs. The claim gets stronger, not weaker, as the child gets smaller and more helpless. A newborn is the most helpless human being any of us will ever meet. On the Church’s own scale, he is the case where the obligation is at its maximum.

The very next thing the Compendium says is that these rights “must be legally protected within juridical systems,” and that “the social value of childhood be publicly recognized in all countries.” [16] So the Church is making a demand on legal systems here, addressed to lawmakers, about what their statutes and orders have to contain. She wants it written into the code.

Set that beside the Catechism on discrimination. Paragraph 1935 lists the grounds on which sorting people is forbidden: “Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.” [17] Social conditions is on that list. Whose parents you have and what legal status they hold is about as pure an instance of social condition as exists.

What The Church Actually Concedes To Governments

Here is where a Catholic writer owes his readers honesty rather than a one-sided brief, because the Church gives real ground to the other side, and pretending otherwise would be a cheat.

The Catechism does not teach open borders. It teaches that prosperous nations are “obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin,” and then it turns around and says this: “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption.” [18] Immigrants, for their part, are “obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.” [18]

So the administration is standing on genuine Catholic ground when it says a nation may regulate who enters and on what terms. It is on genuine ground when it objects to a commercial market in citizenship, because a scheme that sells a legal status to whoever can pay treats a civic bond as merchandise, and that is a corruption the Church would recognize immediately. The exclusion of the children of accredited diplomats is ancient, mutual, and understood by every government on earth. And a state has a real interest in the children of hostile foreign agents operating on its soil.

Take the strongest version of the case. The birth tourism order aims at adults who obtain a visa by misrepresenting their purpose. Enforcement is directed at the visa applicant, not at the infant, and no country is obliged to reward a fraud with a permanent claim on its polity. That argument deserves a serious answer rather than a sneer.

Where The Line Actually Falls

Here is the answer. Everything the Catechism grants in 2241 is granted about the exercise of the right to immigrate. It concerns admission, conditions of entry, expectations placed on the person who comes. Every one of those is a rule addressed to an adult with a will, who can be told the terms in advance, comply or refuse, and bear the consequences of the choice.

An infant born on American soil is not exercising a right to immigrate. He did not travel. He did not apply. He did not misrepresent anything to a consular officer. He is not a party to the transaction his mother made. Applying the penalty to him uses the only completely innocent person in the story as the instrument for deterring somebody else. The Compendium says a society built on a family scale keeps the person “always at the centre of attention as an end and never as a means.” [15] A newborn whose legal status is set to discourage his mother’s conduct has been made a means, and about as directly as that can be done.

The category about commercial transactions is worth slowing down on, because it contains a real Catholic insight buried inside a flawed remedy. A market that sells access to citizenship does treat a civic bond as a commodity, and the Church has spent a century warning about exactly that move, the reduction of goods that belong to the order of persons and community into things with a sticker price. Anyone running such a scheme is doing something genuinely wrong, and a government is right to go after him with everything the law allows. Fines, prosecution, revocation of the adult’s visa, a permanent bar on reentry. Every one of those instruments falls on the person who made the transaction. The order instead reaches past the buyer and the seller and settles the consequence on the merchandise, which in this case is a baby. The wrong being punished was committed over the child’s head, in a conversation he was not present for, and he is left holding the sentence for it. A remedy that works this way has absorbed the very logic it set out to condemn, since it can only function by treating the infant as the item whose value gets adjusted.

Then there is the concrete harm, which is not theoretical. A child excluded from citizenship here who acquires no other nationality is stateless, which is the condition of having no polity anywhere on earth obliged to claim you. The word gets used loosely. It should be used precisely, because statelessness is a legal void, and a person inside it has no government to issue him a passport, no consulate to answer for him abroad, no forum in which to press a claim. The Compendium notes that the international protections for children are “binding on practically all members of the international community,” and it catalogs the failures that follow when children fall outside legal protection. [19] Statelessness is the deepest of those failures, because it removes the very address at which every other right would have to be claimed. The Compendium warns that protecting rights “only partially would imply a kind of failure to recognize them.” [20] A child with no nation is the picture of that partial protection.

The territorial provision deserves a mention too, since it will get none in the coverage. A baby born to non-citizen parents in American Samoa, in a hospital under an American flag, subject to American law, is now covered by an order that leaves his status to statutes that were not written with him in mind. He is a small number in a small place. The Compendium’s rule about the smallest and neediest applies with the most force exactly there.

Leo XIV And The One Knocking At The Door

Pope Leo XIV, in Dilexi Te, his exhortation on love for the poor, walks through the Church’s long history with people on the move and lands on a sentence that should stop a Catholic reader cold. The Church, he writes, “knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.” [21]

He grounds it in the fact that the Holy Family were refugees. Mary and Joseph carried the infant Christ into Egypt to save His life, and Leo notes that the Church “has always recognized in migrants a living presence of the Lord who, on the day of judgment, will say to those on his right: ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.’” [22]

I would ask any Catholic reading this to hold Thursday’s category list beside that image and sit with the discomfort for a minute. The infant carried into a foreign country by parents who had no permission, no paperwork, and every reason to hurry, is the one we adore at Christmas. Policy questions do not answer themselves from a Gospel scene, and I am not claiming they do. But a Catholic who feels nothing looking at that comparison has stopped reading his own tradition.

Leo XIV’s teaching does not abolish the state’s authority in 2241. He puts that authority under a sharper light: whatever a government may lawfully do about migration, the person in front of it is Christ in disguise, and the poorer and more helpless that person is, the truer that becomes.

Civil Friendship, And What A Category Does To A Neighborhood

One more thread, because rights language by itself will not carry this. The Compendium says the meaning of political life “does not arise immediately from the list of personal rights and duties,” and that “life in society takes on all its significance when it is based on civil friendship and on fraternity.” [23]

Civil friendship is the thing that gets damaged first when a country starts sorting its own newborns. Categories written into law do not stay in the law. They move into parishes and school registration lines and the pew behind you at the 10:30 Mass. Children raised as provisional members of the only country they have ever known learn what the paperwork thinks of them, and they learn it early. Whatever the courts eventually say about these orders, that lesson is already being taught.

The Catechism’s foundation for all of this is one sentence long, and it settles the matter: created in God’s image and redeemed by Christ, “all therefore enjoy an equal dignity.” [24] All. Including the seven-pound American whose file is complicated.

What To Watch For

The legal fight will run for months, and the categories will be argued over in briefs. A Catholic can watch it holding one clear standard. Ask of any version that survives: does it place its burden on an adult who had a choice, or on an infant who had none? Does it leave any child with no country at all? And does it treat the smallest person in the room as the one owed the most, which is what the Church actually teaches, or as the cheapest place to apply pressure?

The state may write the rules for who comes in. It may not decide, on the strength of a file kept on somebody else, which babies count.

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Footnotes

1. “Trump Signs 2 Immigration Actions to Curb ‘Birth Tourism,’ Limit Birthright Citizenship,” Associated Press via NPR, August 6, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/08/06/g-s1-137686/trump-birthright-citizenship-immigration-curb.
2. Chad de Guzman, “Trump Seeks to Restrict Birthright Citizenship With New Orders,” TIME, August 7, 2026, https://time.com/article/2026/08/07/trump-executive-orders-birth-tourism-birthright-citizenship/.
3. “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ends Birth Tourism and Protects the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” The White House, August 6, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-ends-birth-tourism-and-protects-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/.
4. “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Executive Order, The White House, August 6, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/continuing-to-protect-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/.
5. “Ending Birth Tourism,” Executive Order, The White House, August 6, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/ending-birth-tourism/.
6. “Trump Again Tries to Curb Birthright Citizenship and ‘Birth Tourism’ Through Executive Action,” CNN, August 6, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/politics/trump-birthright-citizenship.
7. “Trump Issues New Executive Orders Aimed at Birthright Citizenship After Supreme Court Ruling,” CBS News, August 6, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-new-executive-orders-birthright-citizenship/.
8. “Trump Signs 2 Immigration Actions to Limit Birthright Citizenship and Curb ‘Birth Tourism,’” NBC News, August 6, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-executive-actions-birthright-citizenship-birth-tourism-rcna591271.
9. “Trump Signs Executive Orders That Target Birthright Citizenship,” ABC News, August 6, 2026, https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-signs-executive-orders-target-birthright-citizenship/story?id=135437344.
10. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Again Targets Birthright Citizenship,” The New York Times, August 6, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/08/06/us/trump-news-fauci.
11. “Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship,” NPR, June 30, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5876094/supreme-court-upholds-birthright-citizenship.
12. “Though Rare, Birth Tourism in the United States Sparks Outsized Concern,” Migration Policy Institute, April 2026, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/journal/policy-beat/though-rare-birth-tourism-united-states-sparks-outsized-concern.
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 388.
14. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 153.
15. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 214.
16. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 244.
17. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1935.
18. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2241.
19. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 245.
20. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 154.
21. Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2025), no. 75, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html.
22. Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te, no. 73, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html.
23. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 390.
24. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1934.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003