A House subcommittee held its second birthright citizenship hearing Wednesday, and hours after the gavel a federal judge blocked President Trump's newest order on birth tourism. Rep. Chip Roy called the hearing to settle what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" actually means. His own border bill has sat untouched since a 16-14 committee vote in July.

The Court closed one door. Roy went looking for the other one.

The Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government met at 2:00 p.m. on September 2 in 2141 Rayburn for "Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof": Birthright Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment, Part II. The witnesses were Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and Rosemary Jenks of the Immigration Accountability Project. The stated purpose was legislative responses to Trump v. Barbara.

That case ended June 30, when the Court affirmed 6-3 in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, holding that children born here to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth. Roy's reaction was not subtle. He said the Court "failed the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law," then told Congress to define the jurisdiction phrase by statute and cut funding to any agency issuing documents outside it.

Wednesday evening made his point for him. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland enjoined the administration's August order restricting citizenship for certain U.S.-born children, calling it "almost certainly unconstitutional" in a 35-page opinion. Her closing line, per NOTUS: "Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it."

That is the whole case for doing this by statute. A single district judge can freeze an executive order in an afternoon. A law is a harder target.

The day before, a doctor took the Fifth on his own website

Roy's hearing was the back half of a two-day push. On September 1, Rep. Brandon Gill's Oversight task force held "Protecting American Citizenship: Confronting Birth Tourism" and put Dr. Wladimir Lorentz of Have My Baby in Miami under oath. Lorentz invoked the Fifth Amendment on whether he marketed citizenship to foreign nationals, on whether the website Gill was holding was his, and on whether he helped the children of Chinese Communist Party members become Americans.

Gill read the site's own copy into the record: "Now, the dream of having a child in the United States is closer to reality than you ever imagined." He noted it advertised over 2,000 deliveries of international patients, with sections on documentation, insurance, and housing. Then he asked why it came down after Chairman James Comer and Gill wrote to four such firms in May. Lorentz took the Fifth on that too.

The numbers Congress is legislating against are a decade old

Here is the part nobody covering these hearings wants to print. The Center for Immigration Studies' Steven Camarota, the only substantive witness at the Oversight hearing, told the task force his own estimate is stale. He put the annual figure at 20,000 to 26,000 births to tourists, then said it rests on 2016 and 2017 data and that the Census Bureau numbers behind it no longer match birth records.

The one hard 2024 count in his testimony is 8,698 births to foreign-born mothers who listed an overseas address, from CDC public-use records. Camarota argues that badly understates the problem, since birth tourists have every reason to list the U.S. birthing house where they wait weeks for the certificate. He may be right. He is also telling Congress the government does not know the size of what it is writing law about.

The visa counter is where this is actually winnable

Cuccinelli made the distinction Democrats spent the afternoon talking past. Going after the parents "does not change the status of the child." Nothing in Executive Order 14419, signed August 6, strips a baby's citizenship. It delegates the President's entry authority under 8 U.S.C. 1185(a) to State and Homeland Security and tells them to keep out anyone arriving on a nonimmigrant visa to give birth, on the theory that "citizenship is not a commodity."

That ground is already broken. In January 2020 the State Department amended 22 CFR 41.31 to make birth tourism an impermissible purpose for a B visa and to presume it of any applicant a consular officer believes will give birth here. Six years on, Camarota testified that officers still generally cannot ask a tourist applicant whether she is pregnant. Ask every applicant directly, he argued, and a later denial becomes a documented false statement, which makes a visa fraud prosecution far easier to bring.

Two bills, one committee, zero floor votes

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland landed the only real hit of the day, and he did it by accident. Roy's own Permanent Trump Secure Border Act, H.R. 9773, was reported out of Judiciary on July 21 by a party-line 16-14 vote and has never been scheduled for a floor vote. Raskin blamed Speaker Mike Johnson. He meant it as an insult, but it is a fair criticism of Republican leadership.

The birthright bill is in worse shape. Rep. Brian Babin's Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025, H.R. 569, would amend 8 U.S.C. 1401 to limit citizenship at birth to children with a parent who is a citizen, a lawful permanent resident, or a servicemember. Introduced January 21, 2025 and referred to Judiciary, it has sat nineteen months. That is the statutory definition Roy demanded in June, already written, in his own committee.

Ranking member Mary Gay Scanlon called the hearing bigoted. Raskin compared it to Nazi Germany stripping German Jews of citizenship. Neither side wanted to argue about consular procedure.

What to watch

Boardman's injunction holds until the class action resolves, so the citizenship half of the August package is frozen and headed for appeal. EO 14419 was not what she enjoined, and it rests on delegated entry authority, not the Fourteenth Amendment. Watch whether State and DHS rewrite the consular questionnaire.

On the House side the test is simple. Roy spent Wednesday saying Congress cannot sit on the sidelines while two bills that would do what he wants sit in his own committee's jurisdiction, one of them already reported out. Hearings are free. Roll calls are not.

Header photo: Rep. Chip Roy of Texas speaking at the 2024 Young Americans for Liberty National Convention in Kissimmee, Florida, photographed August 2, 2024, by Gage Skidmore, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.