D. John Sauer, then special assistant to the Louisiana attorney general, listens during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on federal weaponization on July 20, 2023. July 20, 2023.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images News | Getty Images
In arguments before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Trump administration lawyers made their case that so-called birth tourism is strong evidence that the U.S. policy of automatically granting citizenship to babies born in the country needs to end.
Attorney General D. John Sauer said many companies, particularly those catering to Chinese and Russian elites, have offered to help their children enter the United States so they can be born there and earn citizenship.
As President Donald Trump watched from the bleachers, Sauer told the high court justices that during their brief meeting, he cited a Congressional report about certain hot spots, such as Russian elites coming to Miami through birth tourism companies.
In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order effectively abolishing birthright citizenship, which has been considered the law of the land for more than 150 years under the 14th Amendment.
“As of 2015, the media reported, based on Chinese media reports, that there were 500 birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China, whose business was to give birth and bring people back to the country,” Sauer said, calling the number “astonishing” without specifying which media reports he was referring to.
Citing a March 9 letter from members of Congress to the Department of Homeland Security, the attorney general said that as many as 1.5 million Chinese nationals with U.S. citizenship may have acquired U.S. citizenship through the “birth tourism” industry, according to media reports.
The United States does not officially track the number of children born to travelers on tourist visas.
According to the latest estimates from the Center for Immigration Research, which advocates for immigration reduction, the number of “birth tourists” in 2020 will be approximately 20,000 to 26,000.
The letter cited the conservative media outlet Breitbart News Network and attributed this estimate of 1.5 million to author Peter Schweitzer, who argued that these American citizens grew up in China and would return to the United States to legally vote when they turned 18. Schweizer also claims that these people will apply for U.S. immigration status for their parents once they turn 21.
A woman and her husband were found guilty in 2025 of conspiracy and money laundering over the USA Happy Baby birth tourism business.
And in 2015, federal authorities indicted 19 people involved in three “birth tourism” operations in Southern California. Federal authorities arrested three of these defendants in 2019.
