'Birth tourism' is the name for fraud allegations against foreign nationals who travel to the United States to give birth to US citizens.Show Caption
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department directed prosecutors to investigate potential “birth tourism” schemes after the Supreme Court overturned President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict the citizenship of children born to tourists.Colin McDonald, the assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement, said in a memo that people coming to the country under "false pretenses" to give birth and secure citizenship for their child could be criminally charged under laws barring visa fraud, money laundering, identity theft and wire fraud.“The criminal laws of the United States already prohibit conduct inherent to so many of these so-called ‘birth tourism’ schemes,” McDonald said. “For example, many such schemes start with a false visa application – with lies about the purpose or duration of one’s travel to the United States.”The move is one way the Trump administration responded to the court’s decision in response to losing one of his top priorities.Trump signed an executive order the first day of his second term to restrict citizenship and he became the first sitting president to attend a Supreme Court argument when the justices heard the case this spring.Trump urged Congress to adopt his restrictions in legislation, after Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion saying the 14th Amendment would allow it. Trump said legislation would avoid the higher bar required to amend the Constitution again.But Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a 5-4 majority that the amendment provided citizenship for everyone born in the country.The number of criminal cases of alleged birth tourism is relatively small, as is the number of children born to short-term visitors.McDonald cited three cases to illustrate the gravity of the charges:In 2024, a husband-wife team of Michael Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong was convicted and each sentenced to 41 months in prison. They were accused of running a business called “USA Happy Baby” that charged Chinese clients tens of thousands of dollars to help give birth in the United States.In 2022, Ibrahim Aksakal was convicted and sentenced to 27 months in prison for conspiring to health-care and wire fraud. Aksakal was accused of advertising a birth tourism scheme on Turkish-language social media pages. Aksakal was ordered to pay $1 million in restitution and forfeit nearly $400,000.In 2020, Chao “Edwin” Chen was convicted and sentenced to 37 months in prison for opr operating a business called “You Win USA” with a 100-person team in China and the United States. The business served more than 500 customers and charged between $40,000 and $80,000 each, prosecutors said.“As these examples make clear, birth tourism schemes exploit our immigration system and violate criminal law,” McDonald said.The number of babies born to birth tourists in the U.S. is highly disputed because the government does not track the figures. Estimates from researchers have varied from as high as 39,000 annually to as low as 2,000.But a group of 140 university professors told the Supreme Court in a written argument that birth tourism “accounts for an infinitesimal proportion of children" given the 3.6 million births in the U.S each year.
