The Department of Justice has ordered federal prosecutors across the country to make birth tourism schemes a top enforcement priority, directing them to pursue visa fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and other charges against operators who profit from helping foreign nationals give birth on American soil. Deputy Attorney General Colin McDonald issued the directive in a memo sent Tuesday, as Breitbart reported, marking the clearest signal yet that the Trump administration intends to use existing criminal law to confront a practice that has flourished for years with minimal federal pushback.
The memo instructs prosecutors to team up with Homeland Security and to look beyond simple visa fraud when building cases. Where the evidence supports it, prosecutors should pursue charges for wire fraud, health care fraud, money laundering, and identity theft, the full menu of federal statutes that birth tourism operations routinely violate.
The Executive Office for United States Attorneys has been directed to provide additional guidance and resources to help prosecutors identify and handle these cases. McDonald's memo also cited several prior convictions as models for the kind of aggressive enforcement DOJ now expects.
The timing is no accident. The directive landed the same day the Supreme Court rejected President Trump's executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship. With the constitutional route blocked, at least for now, the administration moved immediately to the enforcement tools already on the books.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the pivot bluntly. As the New York Post reported, Blanche told reporters:
"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."
McDonald, whom the DOJ has positioned as its fraud czar, reinforced the point, stating that "the criminal laws of the United States already prohibit conduct inherent to so many of these so-called birth tourism schemes." The message from DOJ leadership is clear: if you can't rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment through executive action, you can still dismantle the industry that exploits it through fraud prosecutions.
That approach reflects a broader pattern under Blanche's leadership. The acting attorney general has been reshaping DOJ priorities since taking the helm, launching a new fraud division aimed at protecting more than a trillion dollars in vulnerable taxpayer-funded programs.
Estimates cited by the New York Post suggest between 26,000 and 33,000 babies are born each year to birth tourists, foreign nationals who travel to the United States specifically to deliver children who will receive automatic citizenship. Hundreds of thousands more births each year involve illegal immigrants or those on temporary visas.
Those numbers represent a quiet, sustained drain on the integrity of the immigration system. Birth tourism operators run sophisticated businesses, coaching clients on how to lie to consular officers and border agents, arranging housing, and helping pregnant women conceal their condition during travel. The children born through these schemes receive U.S. passports, which can later be used to sponsor family members for immigration, a chain that compounds over decades.
Border czar Tom Homan, responding to the Supreme Court ruling, called birthright citizenship a "national security issue" and pointed to foreign nationals from China and Russia who exploit the practice. Fox News reported that Homan pledged the administration would "triple, quadruple down" on birth tourism investigations and urged Congress to pass legislation addressing the practice directly.
Homan's framing, that the concentration of foreign nationals exploiting birthright citizenship is "not a coincidence" and "not by accident", underscores the administration's view that birth tourism is not a harmless loophole but a deliberate strategy by foreign actors.
McDonald's memo pointed to several recent prosecutions as templates. The cases reveal just how brazen these operations have become, and how profitable.
Michael Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong each received 41-month prison sentences for operating "USA Happy Baby Inc.," a California-based company that allegedly helped Chinese clients secure fraudulent visas, coached pregnant women on hiding their pregnancies from border agents, and arranged housing in the United States. The operation was a full-service fraud pipeline, from visa application to delivery room.
In New York, Ibrahim Aksakal ran a birth tourism ring targeting Turkish speakers. He allegedly provided pregnant women with scripts on how to bypass immigration officials. A court sentenced Aksakal to 27 months in prison and ordered him to forfeit nearly $400,000 and pay more than $1 million in restitution. The financial penalties hint at how lucrative the business had been.
The DOJ has also been reorganizing its prosecutorial priorities in other areas, terminating prosecutors tied to enforcement actions that the current leadership views as misaligned with the department's mission.
Then there is Chao "Edwin" Chen, who operated a business called "You Win USA." Chen allegedly charged clients between $40,000 and $80,000 per birth and coached them on how to lie to U.S. officials about the purpose of their visit. He received approximately three years in prison in a 2020 case.
These are not small-time hustles. They are organized commercial enterprises built on systematic fraud against the United States government, and they have been operating in broad daylight for years.
The McDonald memo is notable for what it does and what it does not do. It orders a nationwide enforcement escalation. It directs interagency coordination with Homeland Security. It tells prosecutors to stack charges where the facts support it. And it promises additional guidance and resources from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys.
What the memo does not appear to do, based on available reporting, is define "birth tourism" for the purposes of federal prosecution, cite specific statutes, or announce any new investigations or indictments. It is, for now, a directive to prioritize, not a case filing.
That distinction matters. Memos are cheap. Convictions are expensive. The test of this directive will be whether U.S. Attorneys' offices across the country actually dedicate investigators and prosecutors to these cases, or whether the memo sits in an inbox while other priorities consume limited resources. The DOJ's recent struggles to secure cooperation from other parts of the federal government on sensitive investigations suggest that bureaucratic resistance is never far away.
There is also the question of scale. If tens of thousands of birth tourism cases occur annually, even a significant ramp-up in prosecutions will touch only a fraction of the problem. Criminal enforcement can deter and disrupt, but it cannot substitute for the kind of systemic reform that would require congressional action, the very action Homan urged lawmakers to take.
The birth tourism directive fits into a larger pattern. The Trump administration has consistently sought to tighten the boundaries of who benefits from American citizenship and on what terms. The Supreme Court's ruling on birthright citizenship closed one door. The DOJ memo opens another, narrower, but grounded in statutes that already exist and charges that juries have already sustained.
Critics will argue that prosecuting birth tourism operators is a backdoor attempt to undermine birthright citizenship itself. But the cases DOJ has already won tell a different story. Every defendant cited in the memo was convicted not for having a baby in America, but for lying on visa applications, coaching clients to deceive federal officers, laundering money, and committing wire fraud. These are crimes regardless of anyone's views on the Fourteenth Amendment.
Democrats in Congress have responded to the administration's enforcement posture with their own countermeasures. Some members have gone so far as to begin compiling accountability lists targeting Trump administration officials over various policy actions, a sign that the political temperature around immigration enforcement continues to rise.
The real question is whether this crackdown produces results that match the rhetoric. The prior convictions show it can be done. The numbers show it needs to be done at far greater scale. And the Supreme Court's ruling means that, for now, criminal enforcement is the only tool in the box.
When the law already makes something illegal and the government has simply chosen not to enforce it, the scandal is not the crackdown, it is the years of looking the other way.
