The Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors this week to investigate and prosecute birth tourism schemes, a rapid pivot after the Supreme Court struck down President Trump's executive order that would have ended birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants and foreign visitors.

The move signals that the administration intends to use existing criminal statutes to target the same problem the executive order tried to address head-on. It also raises a practical question the federal government has never answered: how large is the birth tourism industry, and why has Washington done so little about it until now?

The memo and the message

Colin McDonald, the DOJ's Assistant Attorney General for Fraud Enforcement, sometimes called the administration's "fraud czar", issued an internal memo to department employees directing them to "zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system" by traveling to the country under "false pretenses" to give birth.

McDonald's memo, as the New York Post reported, laid out the legal theory plainly:

"The criminal laws of the United States already prohibit conduct inherent to so many of these so-called 'birth tourism' schemes. For example, many such schemes start with a false visa application, with lies about the purpose or duration of one's travel to the United States."

That framing matters. The DOJ is not asking Congress for new authority. It is telling its own prosecutors to enforce laws already on the books, laws that, by implication, have not been enforced aggressively enough.

The day after the memo went out, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche held a press conference and put the point even more directly. He called birth tourism a "booming industry" and framed the enforcement push as common ground that should transcend partisan lines:

"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."

"We're focused on stopping that, and that's what we're going to do," Blanche added.

A Supreme Court loss, and a fallback plan

The DOJ's announcement came on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Trump's executive order outlawing birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants and U.S. visitors. The administration had signaled for weeks that it expected an unfavorable ruling, and the Court delivered one.

The ruling drew sharp disagreement from within the Court itself. Justice Thomas warned that the decision "devalues" what it means to be an American, a dissent that captured the frustration many conservatives feel about the constitutional status quo.

Trump himself briefly appeared at the Supreme Court during oral arguments in the case. AP News reported that the President entered the courtroom around 9:45 a.m. and departed just 13 minutes into ACLU attorney Cecillia Wang's arguments.

The broader legal landscape surrounding the case has drawn significant attention. Justice Kavanaugh's opinion in the same case pointed Republicans toward a possible legislative path forward, a signal that the executive branch alone may not be able to resolve the birthright citizenship question.

That reality makes the DOJ's birth tourism crackdown all the more significant. If the constitutional route is closed for now, the administration is betting that aggressive fraud prosecution can at least shut down the commercial infrastructure that profits from gaming the system.

The scale of the problem

How many babies are born each year to women who travel to the United States specifically to secure American citizenship for their children? The honest answer is that the federal government does not track the number.

Two think tanks have tried to fill the gap with estimates that diverge but point in the same direction. The Migration Policy Institute, described in reporting as a group that has opposed several of Trump's immigration policies, estimated that 26,000 babies born annually in the U.S. could be attributed to birth tourists. The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative organization, put the figure higher at 33,000 births to women on tourist visas each year.

The Center for Immigration Studies also noted that "hundreds of thousands more are born to mothers who are illegal aliens or present on temporary visas." That broader number dwarfs the birth tourism estimates and underscores just how far existing enforcement has lagged behind the scale of the problem.

The fact that the government cannot even produce its own count, despite the obvious national security and fiscal implications, is itself an indictment of decades of bureaucratic indifference.

Three cases the DOJ wants prosecutors to study

McDonald's memo included three prior birth tourism prosecutions as models for the kind of cases he wants federal attorneys to build. Each one reveals a different facet of the industry.

The most recent involved Michael Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong, a husband-and-wife team who ran a business called "USA Happy Baby" that catered to Chinese nationals. The pair assisted clients in fraudulently obtaining U.S. visas and charged tens of thousands of dollars for the service. Both were sentenced to 41 months in prison in 2024.

In 2022, Ibrahim Aksakal was convicted of healthcare and wire fraud conspiracy charges for a scheme he operated out of New York. Aksakal allegedly advertised his birth tourism services on Turkish-language social media pages and instructed women on how to conceal their pregnancies. He received a 27-month sentence.

The earliest case McDonald cited involved Chao "Edwin" Chen, who operated a business called "You Win USA." Chen allegedly boasted that his 100 employees in the U.S. and China had helped more than 500 customers travel to America to give birth. He charged customers as much as $80,000 and was sentenced to 37 months in prison in a 2020 case. McDonald described it as a "large-scale birth tourism scheme."

Three prosecutions over five years. Three operators who built businesses around exploiting the immigration system. And sentences ranging from just over two years to under three and a half. Those numbers raise their own question: are the penalties severe enough to deter an industry that charges clients up to $80,000 per transaction?

An industry hiding in plain sight

What stands out about these cases is not their complexity. The fraud is straightforward, lie on a visa application about the purpose of travel, enter the country, give birth, leave with a U.S. citizen. The operators advertised openly, recruited clients abroad, and coached them on deception.

The broader set of legal battles testing executive authority has consumed much of Washington's attention this term. But the birth tourism question sits in a different category. It does not require new constitutional interpretation. It requires prosecutors to do what McDonald's memo now tells them to do: apply the fraud statutes that already exist.

The House Oversight Committee has also launched a probe of four birth tourism companies operating in the United States, though details of that investigation remain limited.

What the crackdown can and cannot do

The DOJ's new posture has clear limits. Prosecuting birth tourism operators and the individuals who lie on visa applications does not change the Fourteenth Amendment. It does not alter the Supreme Court's ruling. Children born on U.S. soil will still receive citizenship regardless of their parents' immigration status.

What it can do is raise the cost of running a birth tourism business. If federal prosecutors follow McDonald's directive and pursue these cases with the same energy the DOJ brings to other fraud schemes, the commercial networks that facilitate birth tourism could face real pressure.

But the open questions are significant. The memo does not announce any new investigations or charges. It does not name specific statutes. And it arrives in the wake of a Supreme Court loss that limits the administration's most ambitious tool for addressing the underlying issue.

Whether this amounts to a meaningful enforcement shift or a press-conference promise will depend on what happens next, how many cases get filed, how aggressively they are prosecuted, and whether the sentences are stiff enough to matter.

For now, the administration has made its choice: if the Constitution won't let you end birthright citizenship by executive order, you go after the fraud that makes birth tourism possible. It is a narrower tool than the one the Supreme Court just took away. But it has one advantage the executive order never had, it is already legal.