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The Supreme Court may have dealt President Trump a setback on birthright citizenship this week, but his administration isn’t retreating—it’s pivoting to a new front in the immigration battle. The Department of Justice is now launching an aggressive crackdown on “birth tourism,” the practice where foreign nationals travel to the United States specifically to give birth and secure automatic citizenship for their children.
Colin McDonald, who leads the DOJ’s newly formed Fraud Division, issued a directive Tuesday ordering all U.S. Attorneys to prioritize investigations into these schemes. The memo, obtained by The Daily Wire, makes clear that this isn’t just about immigration policy—it’s about fraud, deception, and the exploitation of American generosity.
The scale of the problem is staggering. According to the DOJ, thousands of foreigners enter the United States each year under false pretenses specifically to give birth here. They pay tens of thousands of dollars to “birth tourism” operators who coach them on how to hide their pregnancies from immigration authorities, secure fraudulent visas, and navigate the system purely to obtain citizenship for children who have no genuine connection to this country.
The memo details several recent prosecutions that reveal just how sophisticated these operations have become. In 2024, a husband-and-wife team running “USA Happy Baby Inc.” were sentenced to 41 months in prison for operating a scheme that charged Chinese clients premium prices for assistance with fraudulent visas, housing, and transportation—all while teaching pregnant women how to conceal their condition from border agents.
Another case from 2022 involved a Turkish operation that advertised on social media and instructed women to hide their pregnancies from immigration authorities. The ringleader was ordered to pay over $1 million in restitution and forfeiture.
Perhaps most striking was the 2020 case of “You Win USA,” a business with a 100-person team serving more than 500 Chinese birth-tourism customers. The operator received $3 million in international wire transfers in just two years, charging between $40,000 and $80,000 per client.
These aren’t desperate refugees fleeing persecution. These are wealthy foreign nationals gaming a system that was never designed to sell citizenship to the highest bidder. The 14th Amendment was written to ensure freed slaves and their children were recognized as citizens—not to create a global marketplace where Chinese elites can purchase American passports for their newborns.
Trump made his position clear on Truth Social following the Supreme Court’s ruling. “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation,” he wrote. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship.”
The DOJ’s new focus gives prosecutors multiple tools to attack these schemes beyond simple immigration violations. Wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and health care fraud charges are all on the table now. It’s a recognition that birth tourism isn’t just an immigration issue—it’s a criminal enterprise that exploits American institutions for profit.
The administration’s message is unmistakable: even if the courts won’t fix birthright citizenship, the executive branch will use every tool available to stop the abuse. The question now is whether Congress will step up and do its part.
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