Print 
PDF
Immigrants’ rights advocates sued the Trump administration on Monday over its executive order that seeks to strip certain babies born in the United States of their U.S. citizenship.
The case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Birth Tourism, a huge industry in America that the public is highly unaware of, did not go unnoticed by newly inaugurated President Trump.
Heritage Foundation has published a revealing report showing how deep and wide the "birth tourism" business is in America.
Yesterday afternoon, a Seattle federal judge in Washington State put a 14-day temporary block on US President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship.
Here's what is on the line.
Be informed, not misled.
The lawsuit charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution’s dictates, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent.
“Denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is not only unconstitutional — it’s also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values. Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is. This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans. We will not let this attack on newborns and future generations of Americans go unchallenged. The Trump administration's overreach is so egregious that we are confident we will ultimately prevail,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
This is what birthright citizenship is supposed to be about: "The principle that every baby born in the United States is a U.S. citizen. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees the citizenship of all children born in the United States (with the extremely narrow exception of children of foreign diplomats) regardless of race, color, or ancestry. Specifically, it states that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.'”
The perversion of the 14th Amendment.
Associated Press reported last month:
A California man was sentenced Monday to nearly 3 1/2 years in prison for running an extensive business that helped pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States to deliver babies who would automatically have American citizenship.
After receiving a 41-month sentence, Liu was led out of the courtroom by authorities and taken into custody. He gave his attorney his belt and a folder and held Dong’s [ his wife] hand briefly while she sobbed.
He tried to make a case for leniency with the judge: " “I have tried my best to remain a source of stability for my family, but my incarceration will place them in a more vulnerable position.”
“I am not here to deflect responsibility, but to seek mercy,” he said.
U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner said defendants’ family members are often the ones who suffer, but it is the defendant’s actions, not the court’s, that caused the harm. Nevertheless, Klausner said he was reducing the sentence due to Liu’s family situation.
“These are choices you make, not that the court makes,” Klausner said.
Birth tourism has to be a multi-billion-dollar industry. Which is mostly cash transactions.
Google says, "According to available information, the amount of money made through "birth tourism" can vary significantly, with estimates ranging from several thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per birth tourist, depending on the package, location, and medical costs involved, with some cases even reporting cash declarations exceeding $300,000 for medical expenses alone; however, exact figures are difficult to track due to the clandestine nature of the practice."
Birth tourism packages include the cost of hospital, hotel, food, etc., through birth.
And pregnant mothers are taught how to communicate with border authorities, how to hide their pregnancy by wearing loose clothing, and how to be evasive if questioned by border authorities.
This is a large part of what Trump is trying to stop.
His executive order states that while the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it was never meant “to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”
“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'’'
Further exemptions, according to the order, included “when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States, and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth” and “when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary.”
This abuse of the Constitution has been going on for decades.
Now, it has been taken to another level.
The New Face of Birth Tourism: Chinese Nationals, American Surrogates, and Birthright Citizenship.
The Heritage Foundation has published a study on how this industry has expanded:
Their overview of the study:
Lax U.S. laws governing international surrogacy allow foreign nationals, including those of states hostile to our interests or with abysmal human-rights records like China, to “rent a womb” from American women. By combining “ingredients”—egg and sperm—foreign couples can contract out nearly every step of procreation with little oversight. The resulting children gain and maintain the full rights of American citizenship through a dubious interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. While banned in several other countries, such cross-border surrogacy for hire is not regulated at the national level in the U.S. Worse, about half of U.S. states openly encourage this industry.
International Commercial Surrogacy:
Commercial surrogacy is a highly lucrative form of third-party reproduction. It involves hiring a woman to gestate a child for a fee—up to $60,000. In international commercial surrogacy, the intended parents are foreign nationals who use a surrogate in or transported to the United States. No federal laws govern this practice, except for a few Food and Drug Administration regulations on the cryopreservation and transportation of reproductive material from one nation to another. All told many foreign nationals prefer to come to the United States for the entirety of their fertility treatments rather than shipping their egg and sperm here; they are even free to ship a foreign national to be the carrier along with them, although this is rare.
Surrogacy agencies in the United States serve as mediators between the intended parents and the surrogate, as well as the in vitro fertilization lab and other necessary services. Many states, such as California, New York, Washington, Florida, and Michigan, have detailed surrogacy laws and Uniform Parentage Acts that preemptively list the intended parents on the birth certificate. This occurs whether the intended parents are biologically related or not biologically related to the child.
The Rent-a-Womb Industry: From China to the United States
In January 2024, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) released an illuminating report in its journal Fertility and Sterility detailing the demographic makeup of parties to international commercial surrogacy contracts.
The report found that the international “rent-a-womb” industry is disproportionately fueled by Chinese nationals (41.7 percent), with France (9.2 percent) and Spain (8.5 percent) being the next highest nationalities represented.
Of the foreign nationals, the purchasing parents were most likely to be Asian men over the age of 42. Foreign nationals in the report are also far more likely (79 percent vs. 55.8 percent of domestic intended parents) to use preimplantation genetic testing. This allows intended parents to select the “ideal” embryo based on the sex of the child. Parents may also use preimplantation genetic testing to destroy embryos with genetic problems such as Tay Sachs disease, Down syndrome, or cystic fibrosis. Additionally, 75 percent of foreign-intended parents used clinics in California.
Takeaway
The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to guarantee the citizenship of freed slaves. In the era before air travel, the application of birthright citizenship to visitors was marginal.
Heritage Foundation legal scholars Amy Swearer and Hans von Spakovsky argue that, based on the legislative history at the time, the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship excludes those only temporarily present in the country. In their examination of the legal history, Swearer and von Spakovsky conclude that “neither the Supreme Court nor Congress has clarified that the U.S.-born children of illegal or non-permanent resident aliens are U.S. citizens.” As a result, “the president has the constitutional authority to…direct agencies to issue passports, Social Security numbers, etc., only to those whose status as citizens is clear under the current law.”
There would doubtless be legal challenges. To preempt lawsuits, Congress could legislate that for (and only for) the purpose of acquiring U.S. citizenship, the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to people whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens of other nations. The proposed law could specify that to acquire citizenship at birth in the United States, a person would need to have at least one U.S. citizen parent at the time of birth.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.