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When the Supreme Court shuts one door, the Trump administration kicks open a window. Just hours after the high court rejected the president’s bid to restrict birthright citizenship, the Justice Department came out swinging with a new directive — birth tourism operations are now priority targets for federal prosecution.
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald made it plain in a memo to prosecutors nationwide: foreign nationals who lie on visa applications to give birth on American soil aren’t just gaming the system, they’re committing crimes. Visa fraud. Money laundering. Identity theft. Wire fraud. Pick your poison — the DOJ has a charge for every flavor of this exploitation.
The examples already on the books read like a criminal empire operating in plain sight. Take Michael Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong, the husband-and-wife team behind “USA Happy Baby.” They charged Chinese clients tens of thousands of dollars to birth American citizens. Both are now serving 41-month prison sentences. Or Ibrahim Aksakal, who advertised his birth tourism services on Turkish social media while running a million-dollar fraud scheme. He’s doing 27 months and forfeiting nearly $400,000.
Then there’s Chao “Edwin” Chen and his “You Win USA” operation — a 100-person team serving over 500 customers at $40,000 to $80,000 per birth. Chen got 37 months. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re the visible tip of an iceberg that’s been scraping against the hull of American sovereignty for decades.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, held that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to virtually anyone born on U.S. soil. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence suggested Congress could still legislate restrictions — and Trump immediately seized on that opening, demanding lawmakers act.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth the open-borders crowd won’t acknowledge: birth tourism isn’t just about cute babies and citizenship certificates. It’s a business model built on deception. Operators coach pregnant women to hide their conditions at airports, to seek out specific ports of entry with less scrutiny, to lie about their travel purposes on visa applications. Every one of those acts is a federal crime.
The DOJ’s new focus won’t require new laws, new constitutional amendments, or new court battles. It simply requires enforcing the laws already on the books. And that’s exactly what the Trump administration plans to do — one fraudulent visa application at a time, one money-laundering operation at a time, one birth tourism kingpin at a time.
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