Ashley Hinson spent Thursday morning at a housing roundtable in Cedar Rapids with Linn County officials. Iowans have real problems with housing.

Afterward, she told The Gazette she's on board with President Trump's newest attempt to take away birthright citizenship — six weeks after the Supreme Court told him he can't.

"For too long, birthright citizenship has been exploited to incentivize illegal immigration. I support efforts to end birthright citizenship and birth tourism."

And on the Court that had just ruled against exactly that:

"I do think the court got it wrong."

What the Court actually decided

In June, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's first attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order.

This wasn't a close procedural call. Five justices concluded that birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — which means getting rid of it would require a constitutional amendment, not a signature. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also voted against Trump's order, though he rested his reasoning on federal law rather than the Constitution.

That first order never took effect. Lower courts blocked it, and the Supreme Court finished it off.

The 14th Amendment says it plainly: all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. It has said that since 1868.

Hinson thinks the Court got that wrong.

She is a member of Congress. She took an oath to that document. Her disagreement isn't with a regulation or a spending bill — it's with the Constitution's plain text, as read by a majority of the Supreme Court.

So they're trying it again anyway

On Thursday, Trump signed two new executive actions. One narrows who automatically gets citizenship at birth. A second targets "birth tourism" by restricting visitors who come to the U.S. mainly to give birth.

The new order is narrower than the first one. It is still an executive order attempting to do something five justices just said requires amending the Constitution.

The American Civil Liberties Union predicted this attempt will be struck down too, the Associated Press reported.

Hinson's position is that the president should try it anyway:

"I do agree we need to enforce the laws on the books. But in general, I think that we should be holding these bad actors accountable, and if it takes an executive order to do that right now, I think that's appropriate."

Read that carefully. She agrees the laws on the books should be enforced. Then she says an executive order is appropriate anyway.

Here's why that matters: the laws on the books already cover this. Federal law already prohibits using a fraudulently obtained visitor visa to come to the United States primarily to give birth for citizenship. The Migration Policy Institute has noted that birth-tourism visa fraud is already grounds for denying or revoking a visa, and previous administrations have prosecuted birth tourism schemes.

Hinson knows the tools exist. She wants a new executive order regardless.

This is the same pattern we saw when Speaker Mike Johnson responded to the same ruling by saying Congress would "deal with it" — a promise to work around a constitutional holding rather than accept it.

The numbers she isn't saying out loud

Hinson describes birthright citizenship as something that has been "exploited" on a scale big enough to be "incentivizing illegal immigration."

Here is the scale, according to the Migration Policy Institute: roughly 26,000 births a year could be attributed to birth tourism, out of approximately 3.5 million births in the United States each year.

That's under 1%.

The State Department said in a June news release that U.S. embassies uncovered hundreds of suspected birth tourism cases — more than 100 visa applicants in West Africa and more than 400 suspected cases in Europe since 2024, with investigators dismantling networks that coached applicants to hide pregnancies.

Hundreds of cases is not nothing. It is also not a reason to rewrite the 14th Amendment for 3.5 million American babies a year.

Hinson also volunteered who she has in mind:

"The biggest offenders here that are really creating a tourism industry — the Chinese have been doing this for years in California."

This is not a one-off for her

Hinson isn't reacting to a news cycle. She is a co-sponsor of the Birthright Citizenship Act, legislation that would largely mirror Trump's original executive order — limiting automatic citizenship to children with at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

That's the same order the Supreme Court just refused to let stand.

She is far from alone in this. We've written about Andy Ogles, who wants to end birthright citizenship and called the babies "anchors", about Brandon Gill's bill to charge doctors with "criminal conspiracy", and about two Virginia Republicans racing each other to strip the right away. It's a caucus-wide project.

What Hinson could be working on instead

Hinson is running for the U.S. Senate. When she announced, she said what she wanted the job for: to be "President Trump's top ally in the United States Senate."

Not Iowa's top ally. Trump's.

You can see it in what she does with her time. She has publicly defended Trump's trade war while it hammered Iowa. On a September 2025 call with reporters, she said "I know that President Trump will not abandon our Iowa farmers." An Iowa State University economist put the tariffs more plainly: "We're all going to be poorer."

Her Democratic opponent for the Senate, state Rep. Josh Turek, took the other position on the ruling. "I believe in the Constitution, and I think birthright citizenship is very clear," he said. Turek — who voted in 2024 for a Republican-backed Iowa law creating a state crime for previously deported immigrants who illegally reenter the state — put it this way:

"We need to have safe and secure borders, but we also need to have an easier pathway to citizenship, especially in a state like Iowa, where we need a healthy, robust immigration program for industries like the ag industry, beef packing plants and also for the direct care workers."

That's Iowa's actual economy talking. Packing plants and direct care workers and farms.

Hinson had a housing roundtable that morning. What she wanted to talk about afterward was ending a constitutional right that covers roughly 3.5 million American babies a year, to stop something that accounts for fewer than 1% of them.

Source

Tom Barton, "Hinson backs renewed push to restrict birthright citizenship," The Gazette Des Moines Bureau, August 7, 2026. Photo: Savannah Blake/The Gazette.