Doocy Provides Chilling Numbers On Birthright Citizenship

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy drew attention Wednesday after laying out key figures tied to birthright citizenship following the Supreme Court’s major ruling against President Donald Trump’s executive order.

During a segment on Fox & Friends, Doocy discussed the Court’s Tuesday decision striking down Trump’s challenge to the modern interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision.

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court held that children born in the United States are American citizens, including those whose parents are in the country unlawfully or only temporarily.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The ruling means the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment remains in place, granting automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil, including children of illegal aliens and foreign nationals.

Doocy explained the scale of the issue during his Fox News appearance.

“260,000 babies every year are given automatic U.S. citizenship who have parents that are not citizens or lawful permanent residents. When it goes to the birth tourism citizens, that is 20K-26K per year,” Doocy said.

For conservatives, those numbers highlight exactly why Trump moved to challenge the policy on his first day back in office.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”

The order argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted after the Civil War to guarantee citizenship to newly freed slaves and their descendants, not to create automatic citizenship for children born to illegal aliens or temporary foreign visitors.

“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'” the order stated.

“Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that ‘a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text,” the order continued.

The executive order said automatic citizenship should not extend to certain categories of people born in the United States.

That included children born when the mother was unlawfully present in the country and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of birth.

It also included children born when the mother was lawfully but temporarily present in the United States, such as under the Visa Waiver Program or on a student, work, or tourist visa, and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

Trump personally attended oral arguments in Trump v. Barbera in April, an unprecedented move for a sitting president and a sign of how important the case was to his immigration agenda.

Legal challenges to the order were filed in federal courts across the country almost immediately.

The first ruling came from Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle, who called the executive order “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Several other federal judges later issued rulings blocking the Trump administration from enforcing the policy.

The administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to address the legality of nationwide, or universal, injunctions.

Those injunctions allow federal district judges to block a government policy across the entire country while litigation is still pending.

The Supreme Court ultimately limited the use of universal injunctions in a separate stage of the litigation, but the broader legal fight over birthright citizenship continued until Tuesday’s ruling.

For Trump supporters, the decision is a major setback in the fight to restore what they view as the original meaning of American citizenship.

They argue that the current system has encouraged illegal immigration, birth tourism, and exploitation of the nation’s immigration laws.

Doocy’s numbers put that concern into sharper focus.

Hundreds of thousands of children each year receive automatic U.S. citizenship despite having parents who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Tens of thousands more are tied to birth tourism, where foreign nationals come to the United States so their children can obtain citizenship by being born on American soil.

The Supreme Court has now rejected Trump’s executive order.

But the political debate is far from over.

For conservatives, the question remains simple: should American citizenship be treated as an automatic benefit based only on location of birth, or as a sacred national bond tied to lawful allegiance to the United States?

The Court has answered the legal question for now.

Congress and voters may decide whether the fight continues.