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A day after the supreme court upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, acting attorney general Todd Blanche has said federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers will focus on combating so-called “birth tourism” – the process of tourists, temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants traveling to the US and giving birth.

“There’s other things that DHS can do, and the federal government can do in the visa process, and the application process, to try to minimize or limit the opportunity of folks coming here not to visit, and not to do what they’re saying they’re doing on the tourist visa, but just to have a baby that can then be a US citizen,” Blanche told reporters.

“What we have to do as Department of Justice is make sure our agents, our [Homeland Security Investigations] agents that we work with, and the FBI are focused on stopping that.”

Shortly after the court’s last ruling of its current term, the assistant attorney general for the national fraud division also, in an office-wide memo, directed justice department staff to bring fraud charges in alleged cases of birth tourism.

“The Department of Justice will zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system,” Colin McDonald wrote.

During the oral arguments in the Trump v Barbara case in April, the government’s lawyer D John Sauer conceded that “no one knows for sure” how significant a problem so-called birth tourism actually is. The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration thinktank, said that there are between 20,000 to 26,000 births by women on tourist visas annually. This is less than 1% of all babies born in the US each year.

Nonetheless, the practice has been the bedrock of the Trump administration’s argument against birthright citizenship. Many Republicans and allies of the president have repeated concerns with limited evidence that show birth tourism to be a sizable problem.

“I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years,” House speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Tuesday. “You just come on to the soil and have your child, and then they’re they’re able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else.”

Trump’s executive order sought to redefine the meaning of the 14th amendment based on the claim that children born to non-citizen parents who are either unlawfully in the country or who possess temporary legal status, such as tourists or foreign students, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and therefore ineligible for birthright citizenship.

However, a majority of the supreme court proved unconvinced in the 6-3 decision, with chief justice John Roberts writing that the administration provided “scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view”.

Trump is now pushing for lawmakers to create new legislation that establish exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to parents who do not have permanent legal status in the US. But any legislation would need to overcome the 60-vote filibuster, which has proved to be frequently insurmountable on extremely divisive bills during his second term.

Speaking to reporters earlier on Wednesday, JD Vance, the vice-president, was also asked to weigh in on the ruling, and in particular conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett’s role in upholding the constitutional right.

“Well, look, do I think she made a mistake in the ruling? I do,” he said. “I don’t know how anybody can say that if a person who is an illegal alien, or a person for example who’s pregnant and comes to the United States on a vacation, they have a baby and all of a sudden their entire family gets the benefits of American citizenship … I don’t think that’s what the framers of the 14th amendment had in mind.”