WASHINGTON — A day after the Supreme Court preserved the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the Justice Department made clear it was not finished fighting. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Wednesday that federal prosecutors and law enforcement partners would be refocused on targeting “birth tourism” — the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the United States specifically to give birth and secure American citizenship for their child.
“It’s a booming industry and it will continue, given this Supreme Court ruling yesterday,” Blanche said. He argued that anyone who travels to the United States with the deliberate purpose of giving birth for citizenship is violating existing law, and that the department’s job is to ensure agents and prosecutors “are focused on stopping that.”
The comments came less than 24 hours after the court’s 6-3 ruling striking down President Trump’s executive order that had attempted to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the country to parents who lacked permanent legal status. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, reaffirmed the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that virtually anyone born on American soil is a citizen from birth. The ruling handed Trump a significant defeat on the most prominent of his first-day immigration orders.
The administration’s pivot to birth tourism enforcement represents its most immediate avenue for immigration action in the ruling’s wake. The same day the court issued its decision, the Justice Department’s criminal division issued an internal memo directing all criminal division staff to treat birth tourism prosecutions as a priority, instructing prosecutors to consider charges including wire fraud and money laundering in addition to existing statutes. “The Department of Justice will zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system,” wrote Colin McDonald, head of the fraud division.
Homeland Security Secretary Sean Duffy appeared alongside Blanche and called the practice a national security risk. Officials said their focus would include foreign nationals who misrepresent the purpose of their visits on visa applications, as well as the networks that coach clients on how to clear border checks. Detecting such cases has proven difficult; court documents from previous prosecutions have shown birth tourism operators advising clients to travel earlier in pregnancies to avoid scrutiny and to choose airports where border officers are considered less likely to probe why a pregnant woman is entering the country.
Chinese nationals have been a particular focus of enforcement. Federal officials say Chinese women have paid tens of thousands of dollars to operators that arrange visa assistance, housing, and maternity care in the United States. The State Department announced in June that it had dismantled birth tourism networks in West Africa, Europe, and North Africa. A lawsuit filed in April by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against De’Ai Postpartum Care Center alleged that the company had run an illegal birth tourism operation for roughly two decades, facilitating more than 1,000 births.
The legal basis for such prosecutions is not new. Federal law has long made it a crime to obtain a visa through misrepresentation, and prosecutors have previously charged birth tourism operators under fraud and conspiracy statutes. Wednesday’s announcement signaled an institutional shift in priorities — a directive to field offices across the country to treat these cases as high-value enforcement targets rather than peripheral matters.
Vice President JD Vance separately said the administration would continue to press for an end to birthright citizenship through other channels. Trump urged Congress to legislate on the issue, though most legal scholars have argued that any statute restricting citizenship at birth would face the same constitutional obstacles as the executive order. A constitutional amendment would require a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers and ratification by three-quarters of states — a threshold that appears out of reach in Washington’s current political environment.
What the court left unresolved is whether Congress could craft a narrower statutory restriction on birthright citizenship, an opening suggested by Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence, which struck down the executive order on statutory rather than constitutional grounds. The majority explicitly declined to address that question. Until it does, the administration’s most viable near-term tool remains the one Blanche described Wednesday: the criminal law, applied against those who facilitate birth tourism, even as the citizenship that results from it remains constitutionally protected.
