The Justice Department said Tuesday it will intensify enforcement against so-called “birth tourism,” following the Supreme Court’s decision striking down President Trump’s executive order that sought to bar birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants and visitors to the United States.
Colin McDonald, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement, urged federal prosecutors to “zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship” by pursuing cases against people who, he said, enter the country under “false pretenses” in order to give birth.
In a memo to Justice Department employees, McDonald — described by the administration as its “fraud czar” — argued that existing federal law already covers much of the conduct tied to these alleged schemes. “The criminal laws of the United States already prohibit conduct inherent to so many of these so-called ‘birth tourism’ schemes,” he wrote, noting that many cases begin with false visa applications containing misrepresentations about the purpose or length of a person’s stay.
To underscore the department’s position, McDonald cited three birth tourism prosecutions brought by the DOJ in recent years.
One involved Michael Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong, a husband-and-wife team sentenced in 2024 to 41 months in prison each after being accused of operating a birth tourism business aimed at Chinese nationals. According to McDonald, their company, “USA Happy Baby,” charged clients tens of thousands of dollars and helped them fraudulently obtain US visas.
McDonald also pointed to the 2022 conviction of Ibrahim Aksakal, who received a 27-month prison sentence on healthcare and wire fraud conspiracy charges. Prosecutors said Aksakal ran a New York-based birth tourism operation promoted on Turkish-language social media pages and advised pregnant women on ways to conceal their pregnancies.
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A third example was the 2020 case of Chao “Edwin” Chen, who, according to McDonald, claimed that his 100 employees in the US and China had helped more than 500 clients travel to America to give birth. Chen’s company, “You Win USA,” charged customers up to $80,000, and he was sentenced to 37 months in prison for running what the DOJ described as a large-scale birth tourism scheme.
The federal government does not currently keep official figures on how many babies are born in the United States to birth tourists.
The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that has opposed several of President Trump’s immigration policies, estimates that 26,000 babies born in the US annually could be attributed to birth tourists.
The conservative Center for Immigration Studies estimates that birth tourism results in 33,000 births to women on tourist visas annually, and the think tank notes that “hundreds of thousands more are born to mothers who are illegal aliens or present on temporary visas.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called birth tourism a “booming industry” at a press conference Wednesday.
“Everybody should agree that it’s a violation of our laws if your intent in coming here, if you’re pregnant, is to have a child that’s a United States citizen,” Blanche said.
“We’re focused on stopping that, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
