President Trump’s administration plans to crack down on networks it says help pregnant women lie on visa applications in order to secure US citizenship for their US-born babies, an issue that Trump has highlighted to justify his attempts to restrict birthright citizenship.
In an internal email sent Thursday and reviewed by Reuters, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordered investigative agents around the country to focus on a new “Birth Tourism Initiative.”
The operation will seek to root out networks that help pregnant foreign nationals come to the US to give birth so their children can receive citizenship, it said.
Trump has kicked off an aggressive push to reduce both legal and illegal immigration after taking office in January 2025. His administration has used the threat of birth tourism as a rationale for attempting to restrict the practice of granting automatic citizenship to children born on US soil.
“Uninhibited birth tourism poses a tremendous cost to taxpayers and threatens our national security,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement, adding that most nations do not provide automatic citizenship at birth.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on any ongoing investigations, but said it was aware that some networks facilitate travel to the US for birth tourism.
“While the act of giving birth in the United States is not unlawful, DHS remains focused on identifying and addressing potential violations of federal law associated with these activities,” a spokesperson said.
No US law outright bars birth tourism, but a federal regulation implemented in 2020 during Trump’s first term prohibits using temporary tourist and business visas for the primary purpose of obtaining US citizenship for a newborn. People who engage in birth tourism schemes could be prosecuted for fraud or other related crimes.
There are no official figures tallying the number of foreigners who come to the US for the explicit purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their children, or the cost to taxpayers.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration, estimated in an analysis in 2020 that between 20,000-25,000 mothers came to the US for birth tourism in a year-long period between 2016-2017.
There were 3.6 million births in the US in 2025 and birth tourism likely represents a fraction of total births.
Republicans have highlighted allegations of birth tourism as a reason to limit access to US citizenship, which has long been conferred at birth under an amendment to the Constitution. --->READ MORE HERE
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