The 0.3 Percent Presidency: A Justice Department Chasing Ghosts While the Republic Frays
Hours after the Supreme Court rejected the president’s attempt to rewrite the 14th Amendment by executive fiat, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche promised a “booming industry” crackdown — on a phenomenon that peer-reviewed research pegs at fewer than one-third of one percent of American births. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality is not a policy quibble. It is a warning about who is running the country, and how.
There is a specific kind of political spectacle in which a government, having just been told “no” in the plainest possible terms by the Supreme Court, immediately turns around and stages an elaborate performance of doing the thing it was just told it could not do. That is what the country watched on the first two days of July, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stood before reporters and vowed that the Department of Justice, the FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations would refocus their firepower on so-called “birth tourism” — a phenomenon that the government’s own lawyers, in the same litigation that had just ended in defeat, admitted they could not even reliably count.
The sequence is worth stating clearly. On June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the president’s Day One executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship was unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s three liberals, wrote that the Citizenship Clause “incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States.” One day later, Assistant Attorney General for Fraud Enforcement Colin McDonald issued a department-wide memo directing every U.S. attorney’s office in the country to prioritize prosecutions of “birth tourism schemes.” The day after that, Blanche told reporters that the practice was a “booming industry” and that he would put federal agents on it.
An honest observer might ask: how big is this industry, exactly? The answer, from the very research the administration has been forced to rely on in court, is that it is vanishingly small — and that the president is directing the enforcement apparatus of the United States government against a shadow.
I. The Ruling They Refuse to Accept
Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day back in office in January 2025, sought to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who were either undocumented or here on temporary visas. Every lower court that reviewed it called it unconstitutional; one federal judge described it as “blatantly” so. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Trump himself attended oral arguments — the first sitting president ever to do so — and then, thirteen minutes into ACLU attorney Cecillia Wang’s argument, walked out.
Roberts’ majority opinion was not a technicality. It reached the merits, and it did so with an unusual degree of clarity. As Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute told FactCheck.org, “the only way that can now be changed after today’s decision is either a constitutional amendment or by the Supreme Court overruling today’s decision.” Even Republicans with law backgrounds broke from the White House on the point. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stated bluntly that “a constitutional amendment is now required.” Sen. John Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general and state supreme court justice, reminded his colleagues on X that a proposed amendment must be passed by two-thirds of both houses and ratified by three-fourths of the states.
The president disagreed with all of them. On Truth Social, hours after the ruling, he wrote that “no long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary” and demanded Congress simply pass a law “TODAY.” That is not a legal position. It is a refusal to read.
“The trouble is that there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view.”
— Chief Justice John Roberts, majority opinion, Trump v. Barbara, June 30, 2026
II. A “Booming Industry” That Barely Exists
Here is where the math becomes politically inconvenient for the administration. The United States records roughly 3.66 million births per year. Estimating how many of those are the product of women who traveled to the U.S. specifically to obtain citizenship for their child is, by every serious researcher’s admission, difficult — because the government does not track parental nationality at birth, and because “intent” is not a data point on a birth certificate.
But researchers have tried. In June, Penn State’s Population Research Institute concluded, using a decade of National Center for Health Statistics data, that birth-tourism births range from about 5,000 to just under 10,000 per year — roughly 0.3 percent of annual U.S. births. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute reported that the CDC counted around 9,600 babies born in 2024 to foreign mothers listing a non-U.S. address — a figure that itself overstates true birth tourism, because it includes women who did not travel here to give birth. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that explicitly advocates for lower immigration, offers a high-end estimate of 20,000 to 26,000. On CIS’s own numbers, birth tourism accounts for well under one percent of American births.
Set this against the actual scope of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States, which the Migration Policy Institute pegs at roughly 13.7 million people, and the arithmetic tells its own story. If the administration’s stated concern is “the integrity of citizenship,” and if it truly believed the danger came from people crossing borders and then having children here, birth tourism would rank among the smallest possible categories of concern. It is a rounding error on a rounding error.
The people who work inside the system are saying so out loud. San Diego immigration attorney Andrew Nietor told NBC 7 San Diego that “looking at the data, it’s just unclear that there is a need for enhanced investigations or prosecutions,” and warned that mandating this priority “means they have less people to monitor drug importation cases, and gang cases, and extortion cases.” That is what happens when a Justice Department is directed to chase a phantom: the actual predators get more room to operate.
Get Involved Today
Contribute to our mission and turn your concerns into action.
III. Chasing Ghosts While Fentanyl Flows
The question of priorities is not abstract. The Department of Justice has a finite number of federal prosecutors, a finite number of FBI agents, and a finite number of Homeland Security Investigations personnel. Every hour spent building a case against a Chinese couple who lied on a B-2 visa application is an hour not spent on drug trafficking, on organized crime, on the fentanyl networks that killed more than seventy thousand Americans last year, on public corruption, on child exploitation rings.
The president himself made the priority choice explicit. Standing at the White House on the day of the ruling, Trump told reporters: “It wasn’t meant for rich people from China that came over in Gulfstreams.” This is not the language of a serious immigration policy. It is the language of a man who has settled on a caricature — a rich foreigner arriving by private jet — and decided the machinery of federal law enforcement should be pointed at it, no matter how few of these people actually exist and no matter what more urgent threats go unattended.
Meanwhile, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went on Fox News’s Jesse Watters show and suggested, as reported by Truthout, that pregnant tourists and immigrants might be barred from entering the country altogether. Rep. Andy Ogles introduced the “Anchors Away Act,” which would declare a pregnant nonimmigrant “inadmissible” unless she is married to a U.S. citizen. These are not the emergency measures of a government confronting a national crisis. They are the emergency measures of a government trying to manufacture the appearance of one.
“The Department of Justice has only so many resources. They only have so many attorneys, so many investigators. And if they’re being mandated by D.C. to focus on these immigration cases, it just means they have less people to monitor drug importation cases, and gang cases, and extortion cases.”
— Andrew Nietor, immigration and federal defense attorney, San Diego
IV. The Constitutional Illiteracy of the President
Set aside for a moment the birth tourism theater. The most alarming feature of the president’s post-ruling response was his Truth Social insistence that Congress could simply legislate around the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment. This is not a debatable political take. It is a claim that no first-year law student would make.
Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University, told Newsweek the basic principle: under Marbury v. Madison, the Constitution is “the supreme law of the land,” and laws conflicting with it are “null and void.” Roberts’ majority opinion said, in effect, that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is one of those bedrock rules. To change it, one must amend the Constitution — a process, as Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Eric Schmitt both immediately acknowledged, that requires two-thirds of both chambers and ratification by three-fourths of the states. As FactCheck.org confirmed in its post-ruling analysis, the president is simply wrong about the law.
Republicans who understand the Constitution said so. DeSantis, Cornyn, Schmitt, and Paul all publicly broke from Trump’s position within hours of the ruling. And yet the man in the Oval Office is directing federal law enforcement based on his own contrary reading — a reading rejected six-to-three by the highest court in the country and rejected by senior members of his own party. This is the political equivalent of a pilot announcing, over the intercom, that gravity does not apply to this particular aircraft.
To this we must add the president’s own account of what the 14th Amendment was for. “It was meant for the babies of slaves,” Trump said on the day of the ruling. “It wasn’t meant for rich people from China that came over in Gulfstreams.” The first half of that statement is a distortion of the historical record — the Reconstruction-era drafters, as Roberts detailed at length, deliberately wrote the Citizenship Clause in broad terms to prevent future political majorities from carving out exceptions. The second half is a caricature dressed up as constitutional interpretation. It is not analysis. It is grievance.
V. Timeline of a Slow-Motion Constitutional Crisis
VI. What This Says About Leadership
Strip everything else away, and the pattern is this: the president lost a case in the Supreme Court. He did not accept the loss. He did not adjust his policy. He did not acknowledge the ruling. Instead, he ordered the Justice Department to redirect federal resources against a target that his own government has repeatedly acknowledged, in court filings, it cannot even measure. And he did so while publicly asserting a legal theory — that Congress can override a constitutional interpretation by ordinary statute — which is not merely wrong but which senior lawyers in his own party immediately rejected.
Layer this over the president’s other recent conduct. In April, after Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not accept his terms on the Strait of Hormuz, more than 85 House Democrats and a pair of Democratic senators publicly called for his impeachment or removal. Even Candace Owens — a conservative who had defended the president for years — joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in demanding that the Cabinet act. House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin sent a formal letter demanding a “comprehensive neuropsychological assessment” from the White House physician. None of this happened in a vacuum. It happened because the pattern is unmistakable.
“Unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — and what the drafters left deliberately open
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides two paths for the involuntary transfer of presidential power. Section 4 empowers the Vice President, together with either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of “such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. On that declaration, the Vice President becomes Acting President.
The critical word is unable — and the drafters, deliberately, never defined it. They did not limit “inability” to medical incapacitation. They did not limit it to comas, strokes, or diagnosed disease. Legal scholars have argued for decades that the framers left the term open precisely because they could not anticipate every form incapacity might take. As Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, told TIME: “The framers had no concept of nuclear weapons and what a president could do with them. And I don’t think they ever anticipated that somebody would act in the ways that Donald Trump has been acting in office.”
“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows … we are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin, April 14, 2026
Raskin’s Commission on Presidential Capacity Act — supported by 50 House Democrats — would finally create the “other body” the amendment authorizes but that Congress never established. It would consist of former high-ranking executive branch officials and physicians appointed by both parties, empowered, when Congress requests, to examine the president and report on his capacity within 72 hours. This is not a coup mechanism. It is the constitutional architecture the drafters built and that Congress has never turned on.
The practical barriers are real. Republicans control both chambers. Vice President J.D. Vance has shown no inclination to invoke Section 4. The bill will not pass this Congress. But those barriers do not negate the constitutional and moral case. The question the amendment poses is not “is removal politically easy?” It is: can this person discharge the powers and duties of the office? When the president refuses to accept a Supreme Court ruling, directs federal law enforcement to chase a phenomenon that accounts for a fraction of one percent of a population, and asserts that Congress can legislate around the Constitution, that question answers itself. What is missing is not the constitutional predicate. What is missing is political courage.
VII. The Priorities of a Country
A functioning federal government has to make choices. It cannot investigate everything. The president and his Justice Department, having just been told by the Supreme Court that they may not change who counts as a citizen by executive order, have chosen — as their emergency post-ruling priority — to hunt down a few thousand pregnant women a year. Not the traffickers who move fentanyl through the border. Not the sanctions-busters. Not the ransomware operations that shut down American hospitals last year. Pregnant women.
Consider what that says about the moral center of this administration. Consider what it says about a president who, when asked to accept a constitutional ruling, responds by ordering federal agents to focus on the smallest, most photogenic, most demagogically useful target he can name. This is not enforcement. It is theater dressed up as enforcement, and the audience is the same base that has cheered every previous act of ritual cruelty. The point is not to solve a problem. The point is to be seen swinging.
Sen. Alex Padilla of California, addressing supporters outside the Supreme Court after the ruling, put the underlying stakes plainly: “The Supreme Court of the United States said, ‘No, Donald Trump, you do not get to decide who gets to be an American.’ The Constitution decides, and the people have stood up for the Constitution.” The court has said its piece. The question now is whether the executive branch will honor it, or whether it will continue to pantomime compliance while quietly grinding away at every institution that told it no.
Editorial Conclusion
A Justice Department that redirects federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and Homeland Security investigators to pursue three-tenths of one percent of American births — while the president publicly asserts that Congress can legislate away the Constitution — is not a Justice Department. It is a stage set, and the country is being asked to applaud.
The birth tourism crackdown is not a policy. It is the tantrum of a losing party dressed up in a badge. And the deeper story it tells — of a president who cannot read a court ruling, cannot accept a court ruling, and cannot redirect the machinery of federal law enforcement toward anything resembling a rational priority — is precisely the story the 25th Amendment was written to address.
The framers left the word “unable” undefined on purpose. They did so because they trusted future Americans to recognize incapacity when they saw it. We are looking at it now. What remains is whether Congress will find the courage the Constitution assumed it would have.
Sources & References
- SCOTUSblog — Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship
- Washington Times — Justice Dept., DHS plan crackdown on ‘birth tourism’ after Supreme Court citizenship ruling
- CNN Politics — Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship (live coverage)
- NBC News — After Supreme Court loss, Trump calls on Congress to pass a law banning birthright citizenship
- NBC 7 San Diego — Department of Justice promises crackdown on birth tourism
- PolitiFact — Trump allies blame birthright citizenship for ‘birth tourism.’ Here’s what the data shows
- Migration Policy Institute — Though Rare, Birth Tourism to the United States Sparks Outsized Concern
- FactCheck.org — What Do We Know About ‘Birth Tourism’?
- FactCheck.org — Trump’s Dubious Claim that Birthright Citizenship Could Still Be Overturned with Legislation
- Newsweek — Can Trump Still End Birthright Citizenship? What Options Are Left
- The Hill — GOP figures break with Trump on birthright ruling, argue constitutional amendment necessary
- The Hill — Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment
- House Judiciary Democrats — Raskin Introduces Legislation Establishing Independent Commission on Presidential Capacity
- TIME — Jamie Raskin on Trump, the 25th Amendment and Impeachment
- Axios — House Democratic leadership signals sudden openness to 25th Amendment push
- NPR — Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds
- PBS NewsHour — Supreme Court rejects Trump limits on birthright citizenship
- NAACP LDF — Know Your Rights: FAQ on Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
Related News
