U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts announced his support this week for reforming birthright citizenship, saying he's co-sponsoring two pieces of legislation aimed at limiting who automatically receives U.S. citizenship at birth.
"Today, birthright citizenship is being exploited by bad actors and our adversaries," Ricketts said Tuesday in a statement. "We are one of the only nations that lacks commonsense guardrails on birthright citizenship. This incentivizes illegal immigration and promotes birth tourism... Becoming an American is a privilege, not a right."
Ricketts is cosponsoring the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025, which would limit automatic citizenship to children with at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident, or a lawful immigrant serving in the U.S. armed forces.
He is also cosponsoring the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy (SAFE KIDS) Act, which targets foreign nationals — Ricketts' statement specifically names China — using American surrogates to obtain U.S. citizenship for children raised abroad.
Justice Kavanaugh leaves an opening
The push comes after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump's executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship. In a 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara on June 30, the court held that children born in the U.S. are constitutionally guaranteed citizenship regardless of their parents' immigration status — a decision that drew on five justices' votes for its core constitutional holding.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh provided the sixth vote against Trump's order, but on narrower grounds: He did not join the majority's constitutional reasoning, ruling instead that the executive order conflicted with existing federal statute. He left open the possibility that Congress could pass legislation carving out exceptions to birthright citizenship — a distinction now central to the legal theory behind bills like the one Ricketts is cosponsoring.
Nebraska Republican Party Chairwoman Mary Jane Truemper responded to the June 30 ruling by calling on Congress to take up the issue.
"The Court's ruling against the order doesn't settle the underlying policy question or what the Constitution was actually meant to do," Truemper said in a statement. "Now it's up to Congress, and we agree with President Trump that lawmakers need to act. We'll be watching closely and will support Nebraska's congressional delegation if they take the lead."
Ricketts defends the legislative approach
During his weekly press call with Nebraska media Wednesday, Ricketts was asked by Nebraska Public Media News why legislation attempting to limit birthright citizenship would survive a legal challenge when Trump's executive order did not.
"What I believe we can do is pass laws to be able to address the things like the birthright citizenship aspect of it or [the birth] tourism aspect of it…" Ricketts said. "I think that we have an opportunity to be able to pass legislation, and that has a different force of law than, for example, an executive order by the president, which actually doesn't carry the force of law. It's actually just a policy statement by the president."
Ricketts did not directly address the Supreme Court's underlying constitutional holding — that birthright citizenship for children of undocumented or temporary immigrants is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment regardless of the mechanism used to restrict it.
When asked what evidence supports his claim that current policy incentivizes illegal immigration and promotes birth tourism, Ricketts said he didn't have specifics on hand but would follow up.
"I'll get you specifics on those. I don't have them off the top of my head, but we certainly know that there are people — it's been widely reported — that come here illegally to have kids so that they're U.S. citizens. And there are reports of companies setting up the tourism to be able to come here. But we can follow up with the specifics on those things for you," Ricketts said.
Following the call, Ricketts' communications director, Leah Selk, provided Nebraska Public Media News with three sources.
The first was a March 2026 Pew Research Center analysis, which found that mothers who were unauthorized immigrants or held temporary legal status accounted for about 320,000 U.S. births in 2023 — roughly 9% of the 3.6 million babies born that year. Pew separately estimated about 9,000 of those 2023 births were to mothers who were residents of foreign countries, a category closer to what's commonly called "birth tourism." The analysis counts how many births occurred in each category; it does not address why those parents came to or stayed in the U.S.
The second was a 2015 Center for Immigration Studies article estimating "perhaps as many as 36,000" birth tourists come to the U.S. annually. Its author acknowledged the figure is difficult to verify, writing that "there is not any breakdown of the nationality of birth tourists, in large part because the practice is largely clandestine."
The third was a Texas Scorecard article on an active investigation Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered into a single South Texas hospital accused of marketing "birth packages" to foreign nationals. The hospital has said it does not support or facilitate unlawful activity, and the investigation remains ongoing.
The difficulty of pinning down hard numbers on birth tourism also came up during oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara. When Chief Justice Roberts asked Solicitor General John Sauer — arguing on behalf of the Trump administration — how common birth tourism actually is, Sauer told the Court "no one knows for sure," according to FactCheck.org, which reviewed the transcript from the oral argument portion of the trial on April 1.
Ricketts also declined to weigh in on whether he supports Trump's recent call for the Supreme Court to rehear the birthright citizenship case, telling a reporter on the call: "I will allow the Supreme Court to make the decision. They run their branch, we run ours."
Nebraska Appleseed reaction
Nick Grandgenett, Nebraska Appleseed's immigrants & communities senior staff attorney, pushed back on both the legal basis and the underlying premise of Ricketts' argument.
"The Constitution is really clear; people who are born in the United States are United States citizens. That's been the law of the land since the Reconstruction era," Grandgenett said. He called efforts to legislate around that principle "a colossal step backwards."
Grandgenett said that using legislation to restrict birthright citizenship is disruptive to families in the state — hindering their ability to plan for the future.
"I think trying to claw that back through legislative means is incredibly disruptive to families," he said. "It makes the law itself unpredictable, and it makes it hard for families to plan on what they can expect from the law when they're building their family."
When asked about Ricketts' statement regarding current law incentivizing birth tourism and illegal immigration, Grandgenett rejected the premise entirely.
"I think what we see are people who understand that Nebraska is a great place to live, to build a family. It's a place where you can find work, and immigrant community members make phenomenal contributions all throughout our state and our economy — from health care to education to construction and meatpacking... I don't think it's an opportunistic thing where people just want to come here to have babies for the sake of citizenship," said Grandgenett.
Rather than restricting birthright citizenship, Grandgenett said Nebraska Appleseed is advocating for Congress to update federal immigration law more broadly, which he said hasn't seen meaningful reform in more than 40 years.
He pointed to two specific proposals: both the Dream and Promise Act, which would allow people with DACA or Temporary Protected Status to apply for green cards, and the Registry Act, which would update a decades-old cutoff date that currently limits who can apply for a green card based on how long they've lived in the U.S.
"We're in this moment where we're looking for ways to draw distinctions between people," Grandgenett said. "What we would rather see is law that ensures that no matter who we are or where we were born, there's a place for you here in Nebraska — to raise your family, to go to work every day, and to continue to contribute to society and the economy."