ICE begins cracking down on 'birth tourism'
The Trump administration plans to intensify its crackdown on schemes that help pregnant women lie on visa applications to give birth in the United States. Trump is using this issue as justification for his attempts to restrict birthright citizenship, according to reports. Reuters.
In an internal email sent on April 9, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directed investigative agents across the country to focus on a new program called the "Birth Tourism Initiative." This operation aims to target networks that facilitate the entry of pregnant foreign nationals into the United States to give birth, thereby securing citizenship for their children.
Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has launched an aggressive campaign to curtail both legal and illegal immigration. His administration has used the threat of birth tourism as an argument for efforts to limit the practice of automatically granting citizenship to children born in the United States.
On the subject: US overseas territories have become birth tourism hubs for those seeking to give their children American citizenship.
"Unregulated birth tourism creates enormous costs for taxpayers and threatens our national security," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, adding that most countries do not automatically grant citizenship at birth.
The US Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on any ongoing investigations but said it was aware of networks that facilitate travel to the US for the purpose of birth tourism.
"While giving birth on U.S. soil is not illegal, the Department of Homeland Security continues to focus on identifying and prosecuting potential violations of federal law related to such activity," a department spokesperson said.
No US law explicitly prohibits birth tourism, but a federal rule enacted in 2020 during Trump's first term prohibits the use of temporary tourist and business visas if the primary purpose is to obtain US citizenship for the newborn. Individuals involved in birth tourism schemes may be prosecuted for fraud or other related crimes.
There are no official statistics on the number of foreigners coming to the United States with the express purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their children, or on the costs to taxpayers.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration, estimated in a 2020 analysis that between 20,000 and 25,000 mothers came to the United States for this purpose during 2016 and 2017.
In 2025, there were 3,6 million births in the United States, and birth tourism likely accounts for only a small fraction of the total.
Republicans point to alleged cases of birth tourism as grounds for restricting access to US citizenship, which has long been granted by birth under a constitutional amendment.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States unless one of the parents is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. This marked a sharp departure from over a century of legal practice.
Several federal judges blocked the order, and the case went to the US Supreme Court, where oral arguments were held last week. US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, argued that automatic citizenship had contributed to the "growth of an entire birth tourism industry."
Sauer noted that the promise of citizenship for those born in the United States had encouraged thousands of people from "potentially hostile countries" to come directly to give birth, thereby "creating an entire generation of American citizens abroad with no significant connection to the United States."
ICE's new initiative to combat birth tourism, implemented by its investigative unit, aims to identify fraudulent practices. However, it is unclear how many such cases will be discovered.
"Homeland Security Investigations is strengthening its efforts to protect the integrity of the U.S. immigration and identification systems, with a particular focus on fraudulent activity related to birth tourism schemes," the letter stated. The agency stated that it would seek to disrupt "fraud, financial crime, and organized networks of intermediaries that abuse legitimate immigration processes."
In one 2019 federal case, more than a dozen people were charged with running so-called birthing centers in Southern California that catered to wealthy women from China.
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In what was then called the first criminal prosecution of birth tourism in the United States, Chinese citizen Dongyuan Li pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the scheme. She was sentenced to 10 months in prison and released in December 2019.
Another Chinese citizen, Chao "Edwin" Chen, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2020, but by that time he had already left the United States and returned to China, the department said.
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