Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• America is the ultimate tourist destination that no one wants to visit
• Brash America is facing its worst nightmare: loneliness
• America’s interstellar ambitions are now at the mercy of Elon Musk’s ego
When Mateo was born in Maryland five years ago, his American passport and social security number arrived without incident. It hasn’t been as straightforward for his baby sister Isabel, who was born in August. She has a birth certificate, but her passport and social security applications remain under review.
Their parents, María and Rafael, fled Venezuela in late 2020 after Rafael was threatened because of his work with a group opposed to the government. They applied for asylum, but their case remains in limbo.
Isabel was born just days after Donald Trump issued an executive order to impose new limits on automatic birthright citizenship. “Mateo’s documents arrived so routinely that we never imagined it could be different for his sister,” María says. “Now we constantly check for updates on Isabel’s applications, but nobody can tell us when this will be resolved or whether both of our children will ultimately be treated in the same way.”
In September, Trump’s order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge until a lawsuit brought by immigration advocacy groups is settled, but the President’s intentions and the uncertainty around birthright in the US has left many families anxious about what might happen if their children aren’t considered to be American.
Nothing has been formally refused. Under current law, Isabel remains an American citizen. Legal status, however, offers only limited reassurance when the documents needed to prove it have not arrived. A birth certificate records where Isabel was born, but without a passport it cannot help the family plan travel or reassure them that Washington will treat both children alike.
Trump’s Executive Order 14418 tells federal agencies not to recognise citizenship documents for certain US-born children when neither parent is American. It covers children of foreign-government employees and alleged “alien enemies”, as well as cases involving fraud or a “commercial transaction” to obtain citizenship. A second order, 14419, targets so-called birth tourism through visa and border enforcements.
The 14th Amendment has long made birth on US soil the central test, apart from narrow exceptions such as the children of diplomats. Britain, in comparison, starts from a different premise. Since 1983, being born in the UK has generally not been enough by itself to confer citizenship, and at least one parent must usually be British or settled.
If Trump’s order eventually takes effect, proposed passport guidance would require evidence of the parents’ citizenship or immigration status. That complicates matters for families seeking asylum like María and Rafael. But they aren’t the only ones confronting uncertainty.
When they learnt at the start of 2026 that they were expecting a baby, Fernanda and Bruno* decided they would travel from their home in Brazil to give birth to their daughter, Helena, in Florida in mid-August, believing US citizenship would provide their child with greater opportunities. The Brazilian couple spent around $48,000 (£36,000) on travel, accommodation, medical care and a maternity package. “We made this decision and paid for the arrangements long before the order was signed,” Bruno says. “It was a huge expense, but we saw it as an investment in Helena’s future.”
Helena received a Florida birth certificate, but her US passport application was placed under additional review. Once Fernanda was well enough to travel, the family returned to Brazil as planned, using Brazilian travel documentation for Helena and leaving without the American passport they had expected to receive. They still do not know when it will arrive. “We always planned to return to Brazil once I was well enough to travel after giving birth – we never intended to move to America,” Fernanda says. “But we expected to come home with Helena’s American passport, not just a Florida birth certificate and an application still under review.”
Back in August Trump said that “hundreds of thousands” of babies have been born through birth tourism in the US. While there are no official statistics on women coming to the US on tourism visas to give birth, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that between 20,000 to 26,000 babies were born in the US annually as a result of birth tourism, which is about 0.5 to 0.7 per cent of total annual births.
International surrogacy creates another complication. In a typical US arrangement, intended parents work with a fertility clinic to create an embryo, which is carried by a surrogate with no genetic relationship to the baby. Lawyers then establish parentage under the law of the state where the child is born. Surrogacy remains rare, but overseas clients represent a sizeable share (around a third) of it. American citizenship is often seen as additional benefit to using US surrogacy services, allowing the child the opportunity to one day live and work in the US.
Parham Zar, founder and managing director of the Egg Donor and Surrogacy Institute, says his agency has helped more than 2,000 intended parents, almost half of them international. He has heard concern from several families because order 14418 expressly mentions a “commercial transaction with a surrogate”. Compensated surrogacy can be expensive (up to $200,000/£150,000) – involving payments for the surrogate, medical care, lawyers, insurance and agency fees. Now, parents are asking if their babies will receive passports, whether their own visas could be affected and what border officials might want to know about their arrangements.
Zar is careful to distinguish fear from fact. No baby connected to his agency has been denied citizenship or a passport because of the new orders, but he says the anxiety is very real amongst his clients.
The birthright battle is part of Trump’s wider crackdown on immigration, which has support in his Maga base but has proven unpopular among the wider US population. A September Quinnipiac poll found that 57 per cent of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, against 39 per cent who approved, while Emerson College put Democrats 11 points ahead on the congressional ballot, with Hispanic voters favouring them by 64 to 31 per cent.
With Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, debate around the immigration crackdown is increasingly being heard in maternity wards, passport offices and family kitchen tables. It could yet prove consequential in the November US midterms.
Ultimately, the courts will decide whether or not Trump can change who counts as American. In the meantime, families must organise their lives around an answer that has not yet arrived. For María and Rafael, that uncertainty is contained in the documents belonging to their two young children: one child’s status confirmed and the other’s still waiting to be recognised.
*Names have been changed