Politicians of both political parties have blamed either the Trump or the Biden administration for the arrival of the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating fly that affects the cattle industry, in the U.S. after decades of eradication. But experts say the reasons are different or more complicated than either side is saying — and that it’s no one administration’s fault.

The agriculture secretary, meanwhile, has said that the previous administration “hadn’t really done anything” to combat screwworm, wrongly claiming that there had been “no funds” secured and “no plan deployed.” The Biden administration approved nearly $275 million in emergency funding to fight screwworm starting in late 2023.

Since the Department of Agriculture announced a confirmed screwworm detection in a calf in Texas on June 3, politicians on both sides of the aisle have lobbed blame at the other. The return of the fly is a major threat to the cattle industry, and its arrival in Mexico has already contributed to rising beef prices in the U.S.

Several Democrats and some in the media have been pointing the finger at President Donald Trump, noting staffing cuts at USDA or funding cuts to screwworm programs made in early 2025 by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“Apologized yet for the Screwworm outbreak?” Rep. Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, wrote in a June 8 X post addressed to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “You agreed to the DOGE cuts to federal programs that were designed to prevent Screwworm outbreaks.” He repeated a similar statement at a June 9 press conference.

“The Trump administration is directly responsible for this crisis: Last year, it decimated the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which oversees prevention and response efforts related to pests and diseases that pose a threat to U.S. agriculture, including the New World screwworm,” a June 8 Democratic National Committee press release said.

Republicans, meanwhile, have pinned the blame on former President Joe Biden.

“This is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for — that when millions of people came out of … Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well,” Sen. Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, said in a June 8 Newsmax interview.

“The threat didn’t appear overnight; it was the direct result of the Biden-Harris Admin’s WEAK foreign policy agenda and FAILED immigration policies (and wide open border…),” Rollins wrote in a June 4 X post, noting that the biological barrier for the fly at the border of Panama and Colombia “broke down in 2022,” during the prior administration.

“The Biden-Harris admin … ran a wide-open border that turned the Darien Gap into a nonstop highway for illegal migration, infested animals and all,” she wrote in another post the same day. “That single policy did more to introduce NWS into the US than anything we’ve seen in 60 years.”

Rollins repeated some version of this story on multiple occasions, including in two congressional hearings.

Experts, however, told us that both parties are off-base. A couple of entomologists we spoke with suspect that what precipitated the barrier breakdown in Panama was a fly strain failure, which in some ways was decades in the making. Better monitoring — particularly as late as 2025 — would have perhaps slowed but not prevented the arrival. And while illicit cattle movement could be a major way the screwworm travelled north, an expert told us it had nothing to do with Biden’s immigration policies (any travel on humans would be minor).

“Neither of them are to blame,” David Taylor, an emeritus adjunct professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told us, of the Biden and Trump administrations.

The return of screwworm “should not be reduced to a simple partisan blame story,” Dr. Joseph Annelli, a former director of emergency programs for veterinary services at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told us. “The more accurate explanation is a long-term preparedness failure involving multiple administrations, multiple Congresses, international partners, workforce shortages, infrastructure limitations, and the natural human tendency to underinvest in prevention until a crisis occurs.”

‘A Scientific Marvel’

Screwworm was once native to the southern U.S., but through the use of sterile fly releases starting in the 1950s, the parasite has largely been eradicated from the country for more than 40 years.

The flies lay eggs in open wounds and the resulting larvae then burrow like screws into live tissue. After about a week of feeding, the larvae then drop off the wound and complete their transformation into flies in soil, the USDA explains. While the fly can infest open wounds in any warm-blooded animal, including people, pets and wildlife, the insects prefer larger mammals and human cases are rare.

Eradication efforts began last century due to the burden on ranchers. Screwworm infestations can sicken or kill livestock, especially newborns, and they can be expensive to treat and monitor for. According to the USDA, before the eradication of the pest, livestock producers lost tens of millions of dollars or more to screwworm every year. 

Annelli called it “a scientific marvel” to figure out how to use sterile flies to control the pest. Because the female flies mate only once, releases of sterilized males stop reproduction, and the population dies out. Scientists devised ways to rear the flies, irradiate them to sterilize them, and release them into the wild, over time pushing screwworm out of the U.S., down through Mexico and as far as the Darien Gap in Panama.

With the exception of Darien province, Panama had been free of screwworm since 2006, with a dedicated facility producing tens of millions of sterile flies each week that were dropped over the isthmus, preventing spread of the fly from South America, where it has remained endemic.

A New World screwworm fly being examined at a USDA facility in Texas. Photo by Lance Cheung/USDA.

The U.S. declared the screwworm eradicated in 1966, although Taylor said that there were large outbreaks through the 1970s. It was “not really until 1980 that the U.S. became screwworm-free,” he said. Since then, there have been some imported cases, but only one self-sustaining outbreak, largely in deer, in Florida in 2016, which ended after bringing in sterile flies.

“Unfortunately, we are the victim of our success,” Anneli said. “People don’t even know about screwworm anymore because it was eradicated so long ago.”

Screwworm began its return to North and Central America sometime around 2022, with Panama experiencing an increase in cases that year. By mid-2023, screwworm was in Costa Rica, and in Nicaragua by March 2024. Mexico reported its first case, near the border with Guatemala, in November 2024.

Since the U.S. detection in early June, the USDA has identified 31 animal cases as of July 1, primarily in cattle, but also in sheep, goats and dogs. All of the cases have been in Texas, except for one dog in New Mexico. (Rollins said in a hearing and elsewhere that the dog had been brought across the border with Mexico, but state officials have said that is not true.)

The Democratic Argument

In assigning blame for screwworm, some Democrats, such as Lieu and the DNC, have focused on funding and staffing cuts made under the Trump administration.

It’s true that the USDA is significantly smaller under Trump. In one year, the department lost around 20,000 employees, including around 2,000 members, or 23%, of the agency’s inspection service, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The Agricultural Research Service, the agency’s chief scientific arm that is involved in sterile fly efforts, also lost nearly 2,200 people, or 31% of its staff.

However, it is not known how many of those individuals worked on screwworm. 

Using Office of Personnel Management data and figures through April, we got similar staffing reductions for the inspection and research departments. Overall, USDA staffing has dropped by about 16,000 employees.

Three former USDA officials told Politico for a June 17 story that the staffing cuts complicated the agency’s screwworm response, particularly because more experienced veterinarians were gone.

Rollins has said that when she came into office there were just 10 people working full time on screwworm, and that she has now expanded that to over 110 or 120 people. She has denied any negative impact on screwworm from funding or staffing reductions.

An April 2025 memo from Rollins indicates that employees dedicated to screwworm would be exempt from a hiring freeze.

Four former USDA officials have disputed Rollins’ figure of 10 employees, with one calling it “definitely false” and an underestimate, according to reporting in Agri-Pulse, a trade publication.

A few Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio, who is the vice ranking member of the agriculture committee, have also cited a separate March 2025 Agri-Pulse story about funding cuts. Lieu’s press office also directed us to the story, among several others, when asked for support for his claims. It reported that among the administration’s many cuts to USAID were “animal disease monitoring projects” operated by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, including $250 million specifically for global health security projects.

“Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America,” the trade publication reported. It went on to say that the stop work orders went out in late January, “just days before” the Trump administration reopened the border for cattle trade that the Biden administration had closed due to concerns about importing screwworm.

Reporting by KBHB Radio in South Dakota at the same time confirmed the cuts via a Food and Agriculture Organization spokesperson, but offered little additional detail. “Throughout Central America, FAO monitored and responded to New World Screwworm, preventing the spread of the disease to the U.S.,” the spokesperson said, giving an example of the FAO program’s impact.

FAO did not reply to our request for more information, but confirmed the cuts to Agri-Pulse in a separate June 24 story, stating that “the reductions meant that some planned country support — including disease surveillance, laboratory strengthening, veterinary training and outbreak preparedness — could not be implemented as originally planned or had to be delayed or scaled back.”

Many of the scientists we interviewed were not able to comment directly on any funding or staffing reductions. But given the timing of the grant cancellations, it is unlikely that those had a large impact. Screwworm had already been detected in southern Mexico in late November 2024, two months before Trump took office.

Taylor said that once the outbreak reached Nicaragua, it was “inevitable” that the flies would reach the U.S. because there was not enough sterile fly production capacity.

“You might have been able to do better surveillance. You might have been able to track it better,” he said. “But I don’t see that you are going to stop it.”

“I would be cautious about attributing the problem solely to recent USAID, USDA, or other federal funding reductions,” Annelli, who is also the executive vice president of the National Association of Federal Veterinarians, said, noting that he was speaking for himself and not for any organizations. “Surveillance and prevention funding are important, and reductions can certainly weaken preparedness. However, the northward progression of screwworm reflects broader and longer-term vulnerabilities that predate any single administration.”

The Republican Argument

Some Republicans, meanwhile, have been pushing a narrative that Biden’s immigration policies are to blame for bringing screwworm stateside again. 

“With open borders and the proliferation of the Mexican cartels and their illicit cattle trafficking, the New World screwworm began to make its way north,” Rollins said in recent congressional testimony. 

Setting aside that Biden’s approach was not one of “open borders,” there are several flaws with this argument.

First, to be clear, experts do not think migrants themselves are carrying screwworm frequently enough to spread the pest. Paul E. Kaiser, a retired insect geneticist who had leadership roles in two sterile screwworm production facilities, told us that to the best of his knowledge, “no data” support that idea.

Illegal cattle movement, including from the cartels, however, likely did play a role in bringing screwworm north. Researchers and journalists have documented how cartels traffic cattle with falsified veterinary papers to launder money and how those trade routes align with the spread of the pest. But scientists told us that this does not explain what originally went wrong because illicit trade has long been a problem — and yet screwworm had remained at bay.

Illegal livestock movement “had nothing to do with the outbreak” itself, Kaiser said. Animals “infected with screwworms are brought illegally from Colombia into the Darien every year,” he explained. “So illegal cattle trade exacerbated the problem, but it didn’t start the problem.”

Taylor agreed. The illegal cattle trade “may have accelerated the pace of the advance, especially once they made it through Panama and Costa Rica,” he said, “but I think the flies would have made it to Texas with or without cattle smuggling.”

“Illegal livestock movements can certainly contribute to spread, but the biology of the parasite does not support immigration policy as the principal explanation for what occurred,” Annelli similarly said.

Moreover, Jennifer Ann Devine, a Texas State University geographer and political ecologist who has studied narco-ranching, told us that it is inappropriate to link the illegal cattle trade to immigration policies.

“If we’re to point blame for screwworm re-emergence, a big part of the puzzle is not immigration policy, but the war on drugs,” she said.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Devine explained, efforts to clamp down on the drug trade have arguably driven the cartels more toward activities such as narco-ranching, which not only offers a source of funding and plausible cover, but also develops new smuggling routes as traffickers seek out more remote areas for their operations.

In terms of drug policy, the Biden and Trump administrations are “much more similar than not,” Devine said, although Trump has perhaps amplified the traditional approach of interdiction, seizure and criminalization.

“Both administrations have contributed to the spread of illegal cattle ranching,” Devine said. “We can’t say that the Biden administration [specifically] made this worse.”

What Scientists Suspect Really Happened

Several scientists told us that one possibility is that the sterile flies being used to maintain the border in Panama became less effective or stopped working. The specific strain in production had been in use for 16 years by 2022, even though entomologists told us that they should have been swapped out at least every eight years, or even every two to three years.

“The fault lies with, in my opinion, very possibly with strain deterioration,” Taylor said, although he cautioned that this was only a suspicion at this point.

As the flies are mass produced, he explained, they could have developed genetic mutations that made the flies less compatible with wild flies or in some way diminished their ability to reduce fly populations in the field. Although the sterile fly facility in Panama — a joint effort between the U.S. and Panama called COPEG — runs tests on the produced flies to check basic functions, Taylor said, there is no direct way to test for effectiveness.

The strain “was obviously not competitive in the field against wild males,” Kaiser told us, calling the breach in the Darien “completely avoidable.” He believes the APHIS employees in charge at USDA in 2022 should have recognized the problem faster, immediately restricting animal movement and collecting a new strain. Panama did not declare a state of emergency until 2023, and a new strain was not established until 2024, which by then was too late, Kaiser said.

This would have occurred under the Biden administration, but multiple administrations had the opportunity to swap out strains or maintain viable backup strains. 

Both Taylor and Kaiser also said that these sorts of mistakes would come down to management of the sterile fly program itself, rather than a president or even a USDA chief.

“The blame goes down to the local level for not changing the strain,” Kaiser said.

“I think there have been systematic problems in the program since the early 2000s,” Taylor said. He believes there needs to be an external review.

Enrique Samudio, the then-Panamanian director of COPEG, told a Panamanian newspaper in July 2023 that the “fly wasn’t being effective enough” and said a new strain, which had been cryopreserved, was in production by March 2023. He also attributed the surge in screwworm cases to a variety of other factors, including a larger population of cattle in the Darien than when the program started, ranchers not recognizing the problem and climate change. 

COPEG did not respond to our request for more information. According to a February 2026 research study, the current production strain was established in 2024 from 11 lines of flies collected from animal infestations in Panama and Costa Rica during 2022 and 2023.

A variety of other missteps over many years have contributed to the current situation, experts said.

The only facility capable of producing sterile flies until recently was in Panama, with a capacity of 100 million flies per week. Experts say that left no contingency plan in case of a larger outbreak that would need significantly more flies.

“There are not enough flies to do the control,” Taylor said. “You’re putting Band-Aids on mortal wounds until you get more flies.”

There had been another production facility in Chiapas, Mexico, that the U.S. was involved with, but it closed in 2012. “While that closure occurred during the Obama administration period, it would be inaccurate to portray it as solely an Obama administration decision,” Annelli said. “Rather, it reflected a broader perception shared by multiple governments and administrations that screwworm had been sufficiently controlled and that maintaining excess production capacity was no longer necessary.”

Annelli also said that both Republican and Democratic administrations had made cuts to the USDA’s veterinary workforce over the years, leading to staffing shortfalls particularly during emergencies.

Entomologists also bemoaned the fact that the government has not more aggressively pursued the use of an all-male screwworm strain, which would make fly rearing cheaper and much more efficient. As it is now, half the sterile flies that are produced are females and are worthless or worse, since the sterile males may end up mating with them rather than with wild females.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that we don’t have an all-male strain,” Kaiser said, noting the general concept for such a screwworm strain goes back to at least the 1990s.

Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, has been working on such an effort. He said he tested one strain in the field in 2018 but that COPEG decided not to use it for mass production.

“There were opportunities years ago to develop much more effective genetic methods to control a screwworm,” he said, and “no one funded them.”

Scott said it might never be known why the boundary in Panama failed, but “it’s probably going to be a mix of factors,” noting that there had been an increasing number of cases along the border in Colombia, putting more pressure on the barrier. The blame game politicians are participating in, he said, is “not particularly helpful.”

Rollins’ Claims About Biden’s Actions

On multiple occasions, Rollins has portrayed the previous administration as taking little or no action against screwworm.

In a June 10 Senate hearing, Rollins said, “I was sort of shocked that the last USDA really had no plans, hadn’t really done anything,” regarding screwworm. She later asked, “Why did no one do anything about it until we walked in the door in January and February of last year?”

During an interview in Texas a day after that, Rollins said that when she began as secretary last year, she realized “that really not much had been done to prepare for this moment — no funds had been secured, very little staff … really no money invested, no plan deployed.”

While it’s a matter of opinion whether the Biden administration could or should have done more, it’s not the case that it did nothing and had no funding or plans in place.

In December 2023, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack approved a transfer of $109.8 million in emergency funding to combat screwworm “in areas of Panama and other areas that are critical to preventing the pest from spreading back into North America,” according to an agency press release.

In November 2024, when Mexico notified the USDA of a screwworm detection, the agency immediately halted imports of live cattle and bison from Mexico. 

Then, a month later, Vilsack approved another $165 million in emergency funds.

In a letter Vilsack wrote to his counterpart in Mexico just before his departure in January 2025, he said that the authorized emergency funding “has allowed us to increase sterile fly production fivefold in the past year” and to scale up “dispersal, surveillance, education, and partnerships in the region.” He also asked for Mexico’s assistance in setting up “two planned sterile fly dispersal centers in Southern Mexico.”

In two trade publications in June, Vilsack disputed Rollins’ claims, saying it was not true that the Biden administration’s USDA had done nothing, pointing to the sterile fly additions, funding for a Mexican dispersal facility, bolstered surveillance measures and closing the border to imports, which Vilsack said at the time “was perceived to be a very aggressive step.”

One of the reports also noted that Rollins said that some of the $1.3 billion in screwworm funding under Trump came from Biden administration programs.

Two anonymous former USDA officials also told Politico that the Biden administration had left plans and funding to convert a fruit fly facility in Metapa, Mexico, into a screwworm production facility. The Trump administration took four months to review the spending, officials told the outlet. Agri-Pulse published a similar account. Rollins announced the $21 million renovation project in late May 2025.

USDA did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson, however, told Politico that the agency “has moved at lightning speed to obtain any and all necessary funding and approvals to fight New World screwworm,” having “aggressively moved dollars and project timelines at a pace unprecedented for [the] U.S. government.”

In early February 2025, the Trump administration resumed cattle imports from Mexico, but halted them again a few months later in May.

Taylor said the Biden administration’s decision to block imports was a “good move” primarily because it slowed the movement of cattle from southern to northern Mexico.

“There were very, very strong feelings amongst my colleagues in Texas that [Trump] should not have reopened the border, and they were quite happy when it was closed again,” he said. “But it was such a short period of time, I don’t think it really had an impact.”

Now, the emphasis is on building up sterile fly production. Rollins has said that the U.S. now needs as many as 500 million sterile flies a week to begin pushing the screwworm back out of the country, essentially starting the eradication process over again.

On June 27, the retrofitted production facility opened in Metapa, Mexico. It will eventually produce as many as 100 million sterile flies a week.

In March, the USDA announced a contract to build a new sterile fly facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas, that eventually can produce 300 million flies a week. But the first flies aren’t expected until around November 2027, with an initial start of 100 million per week.

Kaiser said it would likely take several years before screwworm is out of Texas again, and over a decade before the flies are pushed once more back to the Darien.

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After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, the president called on Congress to end it through legislation, saying a “long and unwieldy” constitutional amendment was not necessary. But constitutional and immigration law experts disagree.

These experts say the majority opinion from the Supreme Court — which interpreted the 14th Amendment as providing citizenship to anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions — indicated that a constitutional amendment would be needed.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 30, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process. No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”

Trump is right about the significant hurdle constitutional amendments present. They must be supported by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, and then need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

But constitutional scholars, and even some Republican supporters of ending birthright citizenship, say that’s now the path to end it.

According to the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”

On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to parents in the country unlawfully or who are in the country lawfully but only on temporary visas. It never went into effect, though, because lower federal courts blocked it.

People demonstrate on April 1 outside the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara to determine if President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional. Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images.

The case Trump v. Barbara made its way to the Supreme Court and in the majority opinion on the case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights— to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ … We keep that promise today.”

That includes “children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States,” Roberts wrote for the majority. “Under the Constitution,” he said, “they are citizens at birth.”

According to constitutional scholars we interviewed, that leaves no wiggle room for doing away with birthright citizenship through normal legislation. Legislators have been trying for years to end birthright citizenship for children of people in the country illegally, though no bill has ever passed. Now, many experts say, it is clear that any such legislation would be struck down by the courts.

“Trump is grasping at straws,” Garrett Epps, a professor of practice at the University of Oregon School of Law and a constitutional expert, told us via email. “There is no language in the majority opinion in Barbara that suggests Congress could change the birthright citizenship rule of the Fourteenth Amendment by statute.”

While the court’s 6-3 decision struck down Trump’s executive order, Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the majority only in part. He wrote in a separate opinion that he disagreed that Trump’s order violated the 14th Amendment. He said Congress alone has the authority to “enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

Although three justices voted against the majority opinion, Kavanaugh’s was “the only voice of the nine that raises that possibility” of reversing birthright citizenship through legislative action, Epps said.

“Nothing—nothing—in the majority opinion suggests that Congress has the power to limit or abolish” birthright citizenship, Epps said. “Maybe—maybe—the three other dissenters would agree; but they do not say so in writing. Meanwhile, there’s no indication from any of the five in the majority that they are basing their decision on statutory grounds. As of today, there are five votes on this court to hold that the Citizenship Clause establishes a clear constitutional rule that cannot be overturned by act of Congress, any more than the Equal Protection or Due Process Clauses could be.”

Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email that Trump is “wrong” to say birthright citizenship could be reversed by legislation.

“He lost this one plain and simple!” Chishti, director of the MPI office at the New York University School of Law, said.

“Unfortunately for the President, the majority of Justices (5-4) did not support his position,” Chishti said on the day of the ruling. “The majority, in an extraordinarily strong opinion by the Chief Justice, ruled that only a constitutional amendment can reinterpret the current understanding of the 14th amendment: that every child (with the minor exceptions of children born to diplomats and enemy aliens) are citizens at birth. So, 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.”

Jorge Loweree of the American Immigration Council agreed.

“The Supreme Court did not say Congress can end birthright citizenship through legislation,” Loweree told us via email. “The majority held that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects citizenship for nearly everyone born in the United States, relying on more than a century of precedent. While several dissenting Justices argued that the Clause should be interpreted more narrowly, those views did not prevail.”

“If Congress enacted a statute that conflicted with the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, it would face immediate constitutional challenges,” Loweree added. “Unless the Supreme Court changes its interpretation in a future case, Congress cannot override the Constitution by statute.”

At least two prominent Republicans, both lawyers who oppose birthright citizenship, also agree it would now take a constitutional amendent.

“This was not a decision on procedural grounds (ie, POTUS can’t do this through executive order but Congress could legislate it); it is a substantive decision that says the 14th amendment requires citizenship for those born to, among others, birth tourists or those unlawfully present in the country,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote on X. “Will need either a constitutional amendment or a future court to overrule this.”

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah also saw the decision as a call to pursue “the long fight” for a constitutional amendment.

“Neither the Founding Fathers, nor the authors of the 14th Amendment, nor the millions of Americans who fought and died for their country through the ages intended to establish a nation whose citizenship could so easily be purchased, whether through birth tourism of China’s communist party members or a vast border invasion enabled by faithless presidents,” Lee wrote on X. “This is the cheap and cheated citizenship the Supreme Court upholds today. The long fight for a constitutional amendment begins now. We must explicitly exclude foreign nationals who break our laws, violate our borders, or exploit loopholes to make their families American citizens.”

Birth tourism refers to pregnant women coming to the U.S. on tourism visas in order to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their newborn children.

Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that favors low immigration, told us there are “any number of actions that Congress could take that would address the issues that the president is raising.”

For example, he said, the government could restrict the nonimmigrant entry of pregnant women, crack down on birth tourism, or limit the ability of birthright citizens to petition for family members to be admitted to the U.S.

“Not to say that any of those are good or bad ideas (except for cracking down on birthright tourism, which most agree with)– but they are steps Congress could take,” Arthur said.

As we have written, there is no direct government data on the scope of birth tourism in the U.S., though the Center for Immigration Studies estimates it could be over 20,000 births per year. And it is against the law for those who purposely enable it. There have been some high-profile arrests of people accused of running birth tourism operations.

“There are means, short of tampering with the Constitution, to tackle what is without doubt immigration fraud and a misuse of the immigration system,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us, referring to cracking down on birth tourism. In fact, she said, the Trump administration has already taken some steps.

Arthur, of the Center for Immigration Studies, also believes it may still be possible for Congress to narrow the definition of who would be eligible for birthright citizenship.

But Samuel Breidbart, counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said any such narrowing of who would qualify for birthright citizenship would not stand unless a future Supreme Court reversed its opinion.

“There are five votes that said firmly, unequivocally that birthright citizenship is part of the Constitution, and that’s the law,” Breidbart said. “Now, is it true that a 5-4 outcome might be an invitation to the conservative legal movement to keep trying? I’m sure that’s how they’re thinking about this. I’m sure that they’re thinking that they can pursue future litigation. … But right now the law is as it has always been, that there’s birthright citizenship for all who are born here, and we require a constitutional amendment to change that. What the court did yesterday did not open the door to Congress legislating.”

Evelyn Cruz, a professor and director of the immigration clinic at Arizona State University’s law school, told us via email that Kavanaugh’s suggestion that Congress could amend who is eligible for birthright citizenship “stands on thin ice.”

But there may be political gain to such an effort, she said.

“Whether Justice Kavanaugh’s suggestion is legally sound or not, the fact that he has opened the door to a potential way for Congress to delineate access to birthright citizenship, even if the legislation is later ruled unconstitutional, leaves the birthright citizenship issue viable for political purposes,” despite the court’s unequivocal decision, Cruz said.

Lori Robertson and Justine Weng contributed to this article.

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