The Trump administration is days away from announcing a plan to limit the automatic provision of U.S. citizenship to people born in the United States whose parents are noncitizens visiting the country, a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner on Monday.
The move is meant to go after “birth tourism,” which refers to an underground market in which pregnant women travel to the U.S. to have a baby that will immediately be a citizen. The 14th Amendment states any child born on U.S. soil is a citizen, no matter the status of the parents.
The State Department took the lead on the initiative, though visa protocols are administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, according to Axios, which reported the news on Sunday. The administration has not decided how to go about blocking citizenship to this class of newborns, but it has looked at giving the State Department the ability to deny visitor visas to people on short-term business, as well as tourism visas to women it believes may be trying to give birth in the U.S.
It’s not clear if the State Department would attempt to determine if a woman was pregnant or not at the time of submitting a visa application or at the time of travel or how many people would be affected.
The move comes after President Trump divulged in August and again in October that he wanted to issue an executive order to strip the right of any child born in the U.S. from becoming a citizen if the child’s mother was in the country illegally or not a citizen. He also talked about doing it back in September 2018.
Birth tourism has been a leading issue in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Trump has called U.S. children born to noncitizens “anchor babies,” a derogatory term. During the 2016 campaign, he referred to Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz as a Canadian anchor baby.
Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting head of USCIS who is now acting deputy secretary at the DHS, said in the fall that changing the law would not require amending the Constitution, which provides that people born in the U.S. are automatically citizens.
Last February, the Justice Department announced the indictment of 19 people for their roles in an international “birth tourism” ring that brought “thousands” of pregnant women, mainly from China, to California so they could give birth and have a U.S. child. The case marked the first time criminal charges have been filed in federal court in a “birth tourism” case.
The indictments revealed that those involved had promised pregnant women access to the “most attractive nationality,” “better air,” “priority for jobs in U.S. government,” “free education from junior high school to public high school,” and the chance to “receive your senior supplement benefits when you are living overseas.” For $15,000 to $50,000 per person, the women would be coached on how to pass visa interviews, told how to overstay visas once in the U.S., and taught how to apply for federal benefits.
The women were also told to wear loose-fitting clothing when they traveled to the U.S. so their pregnancy would not be obvious to Customs and Border Protection officers at the airport. The indictments also state women were told to fly first to Hawaii and then to Los Angeles because the customs officers in Hawaii were easier to get by. Those arranging the trips made millions of dollars.
