Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is working with federal health officials on a policy to block pregnant women from entering the United States, and his comparison of pregnancy to infectious disease is drawing sharp criticism.

Mullin made the remarks during a Fox News appearance Thursday, one day after U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman struck down President Trump's latest executive order aimed at limiting birthright citizenship. Boardman called the order "certainly unconstitutional" and pointed to the Supreme Court's June decision, which had already struck down a separate 2025 executive order pursuing the same goal.

The back-to-back legal defeats have pushed the administration to look for new tools, and Mullin signaled that restricting who can physically enter the country may be the next front. He told Fox News he was coordinating with the Department of Health and Human Services on a policy targeting pregnant travelers, though he offered no specifics on how it would work or how border agents would enforce it.

Mullin compared pregnancy to contagious illness, and cited his own family

The most contentious moment came when Mullin tried to frame the restriction as a safety measure with existing legal precedent. HuffPost reported his remarks:

"Maybe you shouldn't come into the country if you are late in your third term. We don't allow sick individuals to come here if they are coming from an area that could possibly, come in, that could spread a disease. So there is precedent for us to look into saying it's not safe for you to travel."

Mullin then offered a personal anecdote to support the idea, noting that his grandson was recently born and the mother's obstetrician had advised against flying late in the third trimester.

"I know my grandson was just recently born and her OBGYN didn't want her flying late into her third trimester."

The comparison is worth examining on its own terms. Federal law does allow the government to bar entry to individuals carrying certain communicable diseases, that authority exists to prevent epidemics. Pregnancy is not a communicable disease. It is not contagious. Mullin's analogy conflates a public-health quarantine power with a restriction that would target women based on a biological condition unrelated to disease transmission.

That does not mean the underlying concern about birth tourism is illegitimate. It means the legal rationale Mullin floated does not hold up, and the administration will need a far stronger framework if it wants a policy that survives judicial review, especially given that two prior executive orders on birthright citizenship have already been blocked or struck down.

Birth tourism is real, but the numbers tell a narrow story

The administration has consistently pointed to birth tourism as a loophole that foreign nationals exploit to secure U.S. citizenship for their children. The concern is straightforward: a woman enters the country legally, often on a tourist visa, gives birth on American soil, and the child automatically becomes a U.S. citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment. That child can later sponsor family members for immigration benefits.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller laid out the argument after the Supreme Court's June ruling. He told Fox News host Jesse Watters that the administration would need to rethink who it allows into the country, even temporarily.

"But if you have birthright citizenship, it means if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go look around at some things, in a couple of weeks, that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen and a direct line into American cash and welfare for the rest of that child's life."

Miller added that the possibility of birth tourism required careful vetting of even short-term visitors.

"Well, what I'm saying, Jesse, is that you have to now think very carefully about who you let into your country, even on a temporary basis, because the possibility, as you said, for birth tourism, right, they do that. People come here just to have babies on American soil, and that baby gets to be a citizen for life."

The Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for lower immigration levels, estimated in 2020 that birth tourism accounted for roughly 20,000 to 26,000 cases per year. That same year, the United States recorded approximately 3.61 million total births. Birth tourism, by those numbers, represented less than 1 percent of all births in the country.

That fraction matters. Birth tourism is a genuine policy problem, and legislation targeting it directly makes more sense than sweeping executive orders that keep getting thrown out in court. But framing it as a crisis large enough to justify barring all pregnant women from entering the United States overstates the scale of the issue by orders of magnitude.

Two executive orders down, and no clear legal path forward

The administration's record on birthright citizenship in the courts has been consistent, and consistently unsuccessful. The Supreme Court struck down one 2025 executive order in June. Judge Boardman blocked the latest attempt the very next day before Mullin's Fox News appearance.

Boardman's ruling cited the Supreme Court's own June decision, making clear that the judiciary views executive action on birthright citizenship as constitutionally barred. The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States", has been settled law for more than a century. No executive order has survived a challenge to it.

That legal reality is precisely why the administration appears to be shifting tactics. Rather than rewriting citizenship rules by executive fiat, Mullin's approach would target the entry of pregnant women before they ever reach a delivery room. The White House has been weighing a ban on pregnant foreign travelers since the Supreme Court's June ruling, and Mullin's remarks represent the most concrete public acknowledgment that such a policy is under active development between DHS and HHS.

But "under active development" and "legally viable" are two different things. Mullin offered no details on how border officers would determine a traveler's pregnancy status, how far along she was, or what authority would allow them to deny entry on that basis alone. The disease-comparison rationale he cited does not map onto pregnancy in any legally recognizable way.

Congress has better tools, if it chooses to use them

The administration's frustration with the courts is understandable. Two executive orders struck down on the same constitutional question suggests that the executive branch cannot solve this problem alone. But that is not a reason to reach for weak analogies and unenforceable proposals. It is a reason to push Congress to act.

Speaker Johnson has already been pushing birthright citizenship legislation since the Supreme Court's ruling. Legislative action, whether narrowing the interpretation of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" or creating specific penalties for visa fraud tied to birth tourism, carries far more constitutional weight than another executive order destined for the same courtroom.

The State Department has also taken concrete steps. A birth tourism task force has already revoked hundreds of visas in a global crackdown, targeting the visa-fraud networks that facilitate the practice. That kind of targeted enforcement, going after the industry, not every pregnant woman at an airport, is both more effective and more defensible.

And the broader executive effort has not been idle. The president has already signed executive orders specifically targeting birth tourism as a separate track from the birthright citizenship fight. Those orders focus on visa enforcement and fraud, not on blanket entry bans, a distinction that matters in court.

Mullin's analogy undermines his own cause

Mullin's instinct, that the government should have tools to address birth tourism, is shared by millions of Americans who believe citizenship should not be a product of strategic travel planning. The problem is not the goal. The problem is the argument he used to get there.

Comparing pregnant women to disease carriers does not strengthen the administration's hand. It hands opponents an easy talking point and distracts from the legitimate policy question underneath. It also raises practical questions that Mullin did not answer: Would the restriction apply to all foreign pregnant women, including those with valid visas and no intent to exploit birthright citizenship? Would it apply to the spouses of U.S. citizens? How would it be enforced without invasive screening at ports of entry?

None of those questions had answers Thursday. What the public got instead was a disease analogy that does not survive basic scrutiny and a promise of interagency coordination with no timeline or details.

The administration has every right to pursue policies that close the birth-tourism loophole. But after two executive orders have failed in court, the last thing it needs is a cabinet secretary offering rationales that make the next legal challenge even easier for the other side.