A tearful Phoebe Dong, speaking in court, recalled growing up under Communist China’s one-child policy, saying the government forced her mother to have an abortion. Moving to America was difficult, but she found hope in motherhood and sought to help Chinese women have additional children in California.

On Monday, Ms. Dong, now a Californian, was sentenced at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, located at Los Angeles, to 41 months in prison for running a business that helped pregnant Chinese women give birth in America to secure citizenship for their children. Ms. Dong and her husband, Michael Liu, were last year convicted of conspiracy and laundering money through their company, USA Happy Baby. 

Ms. Dong’s sentencing comes amid renewed debate over birthright citizenship, reignited by President Trump’s recent executive order attempt to restrict it — an effort swiftly blocked by a federal judge as “blatantly unconstitutional.” As the court battle unfolds, the question is: Should children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents receive automatic citizenship? 

Birth tourism, in which foreign nationals travel to America to give birth and secure citizenship for their child, exists in a legal gray area. While the 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship, the practice can lead to visa fraud charges if the primary intent is to obtain citizenship.

How Extensive Is the Practice?

Identifying the exact number of births in the United States under the “tourism” umbrella is hard to determine. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that more than 20,000 births in the United States each year were to mothers on tourist visas and indicated that many more were to those in the country unlawfully. 

Prosecutors, who pushed for a five-year sentence, argued that Ms. Dong and her husband helped more than 100 pregnant Chinese women evade detection at American airports by coaching them to wear loose clothing and enter through more lenient entry points. USA Happy Baby charged some clients up to $100,000, serving Communist Chinese officials and elites, prosecutors stated. 

Ms. Liu and Mr. Dong leased apartments under the names of individuals who had no intention of living there to accommodate the women, prosecutors said. They also emphasized that some wealthy clients of these businesses showed blatant disregard for the American legal system by defying court orders to remain in the country for the investigation and leaving behind unpaid hospital bills.

In court documents unsealed in 2019, prosecutors also accused the couple of tax fraud, failing to report $1.9 million in income while funneling $3.4 million from China through multiple bank accounts. Mr. Liu was sentenced to 41 months behind bars in December. 

For Profit Companies 

How extensive are such operations? It isn’t easy to pinpoint. A Shanghai newspaper, National Business Daily, reported in 2014 that at least 500 companies in China offered “birth tourism” services abroad. Beijing considers these legitimate businesses. 

“These schemes in the United States have gotten much more prevalent and sophisticated in recent years, due mainly to the fact that for a long time, the Department of Justice virtually ignored this issue,” Election Law Reform Initiative Manager and Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Hans von Spakovsky, tells The New York Sun. 

Mr. Spakovsky noted that despite birth tourism operations existing for decades, the Department of Justice did not pursue significant prosecutions against these agencies until 2019. 

Raids on USA Happy Baby took place in 2015 and led to a broader investigation of other similar operations. Charges, however, were not brought until four years later. 

Federal prosecutors in the Los Angeles area unveiled indictments connecting 17 people, in addition to Ms. Liu and Mr. Dong, to Chinese “birth tourism” companies, which facilitated thousands of individuals giving birth in the United States. 

“The birth tourism operations not only committed widespread immigration fraud and engaged in international money laundering, they also defrauded property owners when leasing the apartments and houses used in their birth tourism schemes, according to the indictments,” United States Immigration Customs Enforcement said in a press release at the time. 

In one case, Dongyuan Li, who ran another birth tourism company, You Win USA Vacation Services Corp., used 20 apartments and charged clients up to $80,000, receiving $3 million in wire transfers from China. Her business served more than 500 clients, including cases in which customers sought refunds after discovering their baby’s gender was a girl and then wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Ms. Li pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and visa fraud later that year and was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment. 

In another case, Wen Rui Deng was charged with running Star Baby Care, one of the largest birth tourism operations in America. His agency allegedly served 8,000 clients from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including Chinese officials, beginning in 1999, using multiple properties in California. Mr. Deng is believed to have fled to China before the indictment was made public.  

A Long-Running Issue

Years before these revelations, a number of similar agencies came under the scrutiny of authorities and were allowed to continue functioning. 

In 2013, after receiving numerous complaints, authorities at Los Angeles closed several “maternity tourism” houses that catered to pregnant women, primarily from China and Taiwan, seeking to give birth in America for their children’s citizenship. 

City inspectors visited 20 such houses, granting permission for seven to continue operating. The closures were mostly due to zoning violations and the conversion of single-family homes into overcrowded accommodations rather than the result of the nature of the business. 

“These recovery homes do what they’re going to do, and as long as we see they’re in compliance, then we don’t go and crack down on them,” a supervising regional planner at the Los Angeles Department of Regional Planning, Alex Garcia, said at the time.

Three years after an FBI raid on their offices, legally registered company Miami Mama openly boasted about continuing to bring Russian nationals to Florida to give birth, with Russians paying tens of thousands of dollars for various luxurious packages. 

The company, which was formed in 2009, remains active, according to its business filings, but has not updated its social media in several years. The business could not be reached for comment. 

In 2020, six individuals were charged in Suffolk County, New York in a “birth tourism” scheme that helped Turkish women obtain American citizenship for their children, costing taxpayers more than $2 million. 

The ringleaders, Sarah Kaplan and Ibrahim Aksakal, allegedly advertised their services on Turkish-language Facebook pages, offering “My Baby Should be Born in America” full-service packages, including lodging, transportation, help with citizenship applications, and fraudulent Medicaid coverage for medical costs. 

Between January 2017 and September 2020, investigators claim the defendants received about $750,000 in fees, and Medicaid disbursed of more than $2.1 million in illicit benefits.

While California has been at the center of the prosecutions to-date, experts believe the underground practice extends into many other pockets of the country.

Legal Issues

Is it illegal? The answer is murky. 

New York-based immigration attorney Lorenz Wolffers tells the Sun that it is “perfectly legal for a foreigner to have a baby in the U.S.”

“The charges in the California case deal with conspiracy and money laundering, not with the actual childbearing,” he said. 

Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, David Bier, also surmised that it is “not a crime to travel to the US to give birth, which is done for health reasons as much as it is for US citizenship.”

“Birth tourism accounts for a very small share of US births and is unambiguously protected by the 14th amendment,” he tells the Sun. 

The 14th Amendment grants American citizenship to any child born on American soil. Critics of birthright immigration, however, argue that the original intent of the founding fathers is misinterpreted. 

“We need to consider its original intent, which was to ensure the recognition of emancipated slaves. The critical phrase to examine is ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” a representative for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Ira Mehlman, tells the Sun. “The original intent was never to allow individuals with no connection to the country to come here solely to have children.”

Mr. Spakovsky concurred. 

“Donald Trump is not engaging in a constitutional change; he is simply changing government policy to enforce the 14th Amendment according to both its plain text and the original understanding of the language of the amendment by the sponsors of the amendment in Congress,” he said. 

National Security Concerns

The indictments over the years reveal that the questionable businesses promoted the advantages of giving birth in the United States over China, touting benefits like “the most attractive nationality,” better air quality, and priority for American government jobs. 

They also highlighted superior education, the ability to apply for loans and grants, and the possibility of receiving senior benefits while living abroad. One benefit, however, has some political appointees raising red flags: once 21, the ability to petition and secure a Green Card for parents. As “immediate relatives,” they do not have to wait in line. 

Congressman Tiffany raised concerns in a December House Judiciary subcommittee hearing about the Chinese “birth tourism” industry and highlighted the national security risks and financial burden on American taxpayers, with entrepreneurs profiting from the practice and the value of American citizenship being diminished. 

Mr. Tiffany also pointed out that, since 2009, Chinese passport holders have been allowed to bypass United States visa requirements and enter the Northern Mariana Islands through a parole program established by the Obama administration. 

Closing loopholes and ending birthright citizenship has long been a high priority for Mr. Trump. While he did not go as far as to sign an executive order challenging the ruling in his first term, his administration in 2020 did introduce a visa rule aimed at curbing birth tourism, claiming it was necessary to protect national security and prevent abuses. 

The rule required tourist visa applicants to prove they were not planning to give birth on American soil to secure citizenship for their child. The administration cited concerns over foreign entities exploiting birth tourism to recruit American citizens for activities that could threaten national security. The State Department argued that birth tourism facilitated criminal activity and posed security risks, particularly with countries having “sensitive relations” with the United States.

The Biden administration did not rescind the rule, which is still in effect. Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda outlining priorities, meanwhile, includes discussions about ending birthright citizenship. It proposes challenging the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment to restrict automatic citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants. 

“It is a national security problem when individuals who enter this country illegally use childbirth as a way to thwart our immigration system to use chain migration to stay in the country,” Mr. Spakovsky said. 

Others see this as an overblown and non-existent issue.

“Birth tourism is no more of a national security risk than births generally,” Mr. Bier added. “Any US citizen can commit a crime, but there is no evidence that birth tourist children are more likely to commit crimes than others or that any foreign country has ever used a birth tourist child for this purpose.”