A senior DOJ official said foreign nationals are traveling to the country ‘under false pretenses’ to give birth and secure U.S. citizenship for their child.
Federal prosecutors on June 30 were directed to prioritize investigations into “birth tourism” schemes after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants.
Colin McDonald, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for fraud, said in a memo to department employees that the U.S. immigration system is being exploited by foreign nationals who travel to the country “under false pretenses” to give birth and secure U.S. citizenship for their children.
He instructed all U.S. attorneys and the Criminal Division to work with the Department of Homeland Security to investigate and prosecute those involved in such schemes.
“The Department of Justice will investigate and hold accountable those who engage in this unlawful conduct, as well as those who solicit and sell these criminal services to others,” McDonald said.
The memo cites some cases related to birth tourism schemes, including one from 2024 that involved a couple who allegedly helped Chinese nationals to give birth in the United States in exchange for money.
The couple, identified as Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong, operated a business called “USA Happy Baby Inc.” that helped Chinese nationals obtain fraudulent visas to enter the United States. They also provided housing and coached their customers on how to hide their pregnancies from immigration authorities, according to the department. The two were each sentenced to 41 months in prison.
In another case, a Chinese fugitive named Chao “Edwin“ Chen allegedly ran a “large-scale birth tourism scheme” that charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to help foreign nationals give birth in the United States. The department said Chen’s business claimed to have a “100-person team” in China and the United States and to have served more than 500 Chinese birth tourism customers.
“As these examples make clear, birth tourism schemes exploit our immigration system and violate criminal law,” McDonald said.
Many birth tourism-related cases were prosecuted as visa fraud. McDonald said federal prosecutors should consider prosecuting the schemes under laws covering wire fraud, money laundering, illegal use of a means of identification, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud.
Trump’s order on birthright citizenship, issued on Jan. 20, 2025, stated that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause does not extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.
According to the order, a person born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” if his or her mother was unlawfully present in the country and the individual’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the person’s birth.
However, the Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that Trump’s executive order ran counter to the U.S. Constitution.
