DHS Expands List of US-Born Children Ineligible for Birthright Citizenship

The Department of Homeland Security is expanding the category of children born in the United States whom the agency considers ineligible for birthright citizenship. Those children are instead eligible to register as lawful permanent residents with green cards.

The DHS rule expands the category beyond children of foreign diplomatic officers accredited to the U.S. to include children of certain foreign nationals working for their countries’ embassies or consulates, other foreign government employees serving in an official capacity, and employees of international organizations with immunity. That’s according to an interim final rule that was put up for inspection and is set for official publication on Sept. 9.

The rule also states that “a child of a foreign government employee is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for purposes of birthright citizenship unless at least one parent of the child is a United States citizen.”

The regulation implements President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14418, which was issued Aug. 6, and directs federal agencies not to recognize the U.S. citizenship of several categories of American-born children, including those with a parent employed by a foreign government.

The legality of that order is being contested in CASA v. Trump, a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrant families and advocacy organizations challenging the administration’s birthright-citizenship restrictions.

On Sept. 2, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from applying the order to U.S.-born children whose mothers were unlawfully or temporarily in the country and whose fathers were neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents.

“Since his second term in office began on January 20, 2025, the President has tried, through Executive Order, to upend our country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship and eliminate, for large swaths of Americans, the right to citizenship by birth, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Boardman wrote.

Boardman found that the plaintiffs were likely to prove the order violated those children’s rights under the 14th Amendment. She wrote Trump’s executive order “is almost certainly unconstitutional” when applied to a certain class based on a previous Supreme Court ruling. The injunction remains in place while the lawsuit proceeds.

DHS acknowledged the ruling in its announcement, saying it would not apply the new regulation to members of the protected class unless the injunction is lifted.

“DHS will not take actions to implement the rule specifically to any member of the certified class, or otherwise conflict with the preliminary injunction, unless and until the government obtains relief from the injunction,” DHS said in the statement.