Texas Republican leaders are pushing ahead with efforts to crack down on alleged "birth tourism," even as a federal district court has blocked an effort by President Donald Trump to do the same nationwide. A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump's August executive order banning the practice last week.
The ruling last Wednesday marked the latest defeat for Trump's efforts to curtail or restrict the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants U.S. citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, regardless of the legal status of the parents.
Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term denying automatic U.S. citizenship to anyone whose parents were in the United States illegally. On June 30, the final day of its 2025-26 term, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the definition of birthright citizenship as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment, ruling 6-3 that Trump's order was unconstitutional.
Trump responded by issuing a new pair of executive orders in August. One of these ordered the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to take steps to revoke the visas of any noncitizens coming to the U.S. for the purposes of giving birth and gaining U.S. citizenship for their children, as well as to permanently bar such noncitizens from entering the U.S.
"What the Supreme Court said is if you're born on U.S. soil, you're presumptively a citizen unless there's some sort of a fiction, some reason why you're not actually here," said Josh Blackman, a professor of constitutional law at South Texas College of Law Houston. "I think what Trump [was] arguing in this order is that if there's allegations of fraud, that is you didn't come here under the right circumstances, it's as if you were really never here ... I don't see that that clearly follows from the Supreme Court's opinion."
Judge Deborah Boardman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland agreed. Boardman wrote in her decision, issued last Wednesday, that the Supreme Court's June ruling meant that Trump's August executive order "is almost certainly unconstitutional."
"The administration talked so much about birth tourism in their larger attempt to change to birthright citizenship that there are probably some voters who are thinking, 'Well, why aren't we seeing more action on this front?,'" said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. program at the Migration Policy Institute. "I think we may be seeing the administration trying to satisfy the people who they had sort of activated on the issue."
Gelatt said that the prospect of birthright citizenship being abused, particularly by private companies bringing in alleged birth tourists to make a profit, is something about which U.S. citizens have a right to be concerned. But she also said it's important not to exaggerate the extent of the problem.
"It's a pretty small phenomenon," Gelatt said. "Less than 1% of U.S. births annually can be attributed to birth tourism. There are already policies in place that lead to higher scrutiny of travelers who may be coming while pregnant."
Houston immigration attorney Gordon Quan agreed. He said that even without new action from the Trump administration, U.S. consuls around the world already have wide latitude to prevent people from entering the U.S. for purposes of giving birth.
"It's not easy for anybody to get a visa," Quan said. "Millions of people every year are denied visas arbitrarily. The consul has total authority to give a visa or not. They don't like the clothes you're wearing. They don't like an answer you give. It's a selective process."
How Texas Republican leaders are responding
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton didn't wait for the Supreme Court to issue its ruling on Trump's original birthright citizenship order before making his first move to crack down on alleged birth tourism. In late April, during his primary runoff to capture the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Houston-area De'Ai Postpartum Care Center — alleging the facility operated as a maternity hotel.
Paxton charged the center and its proprietors had violated a number of Texas laws in order to encourage Chinese nationals to come to the United States for the purposes of earning citizenship for their children. Those charges included conspiracy, unlawful concealment and harboring in violation of federal law, as well as violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
"America is for Americans, not foreigners trying to cheat the system to claim citizenship," Paxton said in a press release in April. "The Center's scheme not only facilitated an invasion of Texas, but it also involved shielding and facilitating violations of immigration law. Birthright citizenship is a scam that threatens national security, and I will do everything in my power to stop unlawful 'birth tourism' schemes like this one."
De'Ai's attorney, Eric Nichols, declined to be interviewed for this story. But according to court documents, the defendants deny all allegations in the suit.
Immigration attorney Gordon Quan said he doesn't think much of the state's case.
"There's this idea of anchor babies, the people coming in just to have a child, so the parents can get their green cards," Quan said. "Just because you have a child born in the United States doesn't mean that you're allowed to stay. That child cannot sponsor you until they're 21, and if you accrue unlawful presence, you have a 10-year bar to go back out of the country before you can come in."
Paxton is seeking an injunction to shut down the De'Ai Postpartum Care Center, which he said facilitates up to 20 births per day at locations in Houston, Sugar Land, Richmond, and Rosenberg. The next hearing in the case is scheduled to take place in Fort Bend County later this month.
The next moves came almost immediately after the Supreme Court issued its decision on birthright citizenship. State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, issued a call on social media for Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session of the Texas Legislature to make birth tourism a state felony.
Abbott demurred, but a few days later, he directed the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HSSC) to open an investigation into the Mission Regional Medical Center in the Rio Grande Valley for allegedly promoting birth tourism packages aimed at Mexican nationals.
"Birth tourism is an illegal practice that exploits the extraordinary hospitality that the United States and Texas offer to millions of foreign travelers each year," Abbott said in a press release in July. "Thousands of foreign travelers come to the United States under false pretenses to give birth and secure citizenship for their children. HHSC must investigate the hospital, a facility it regulates, for any violations of state law and contractual obligations."
Paxton soon ordered his own investigation into Misson Regional Medical Center, as well as another health care provider in south Texas, Knapp Medical Center. Knapp did not respond to a request for comment, but Mission Regional did.
"We recognize that a very limited marketing campaign may have caused unintended misunderstanding and was immediately discontinued," a spokesperson for Mission Regional said in a statement. "The very limited campaign consisted of only two billboards located near the hospital and a website that generated very little patient volume, produced no financial benefit to the hospital, and was only intended as a service for the community, which is one of the most medically underserved regions of Texas, where approximately 30% of residents are uninsured and access to maternity care continues to decline."
Three weeks after the Supreme Court's decision, Abbott issued his own executive order.
"What I decided to do was to make sure that any agency in the state of Texas involved in whatsoever in providing licensing to any healthcare provider, they must be investigated to determine whether or not they are involved in in birth tourism, and if so take action against them, including what I call the death penalty for a business and that is to pull their license so they would not be able to operate," Abbott told Fox News.
Abbott said Texas would be working hand-in-hand with the Trump administration to crack down on the practice of birth tourism, reporting all the findings of its investigations to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The laws on the books
Lying about one's reason for coming to the U.S. to obtain a visa is already a federal offense. If a noncitizen is found to have come to the U.S. specifically to give birth and concealed that fact during her visa application process, that alone would be grounds for deportation and a ten-year ban on returning to the U.S.
The primary concern of both Texas and the federal government, according to former U.S. Border Patrol agent Ammon Blair, is not individual visa applicants but rather activity by transnational networks involved in human smuggling operations. Blair, who now works as a senior fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said the most significant such networks are the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Mexican cartels. He said such operations are extremely lucrative.
"For Chinese nationals we would see sometimes anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000 per person, and for those that are in the Western Hemisphere, maybe $8,000 to $10,000 per person," Blair said. "And so, if you were able to bust an entire network, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars ... [even] millions, depending on how many people you bring into the United States."
Blair pointed to a range of existing federal statutes that could be used to prosecute such transnational operations, including making false statements on a visa application, wire fraud, health care fraud, money laundering and identity theft. But he said such networks are typically well organized and skilled at covering their tracks.
"Do the guys in the ground ... have the ability to actually conduct the investigations to go forward with this and create a case and show an established network to bring forth tourism into the United States, specifically for the idea of getting citizenship?" Blair said. "It's going to take [not only] the Department of State, DHS, but all those that are actually local law enforcement — county sheriffs, your state law enforcement ... Texas DPS with their division of CID [Criminal Investigations Division] ... or the Texas Rangers."
Even then, Blair said, such networks frequently advertise their services using encrypted apps that are hard to identify and harder to crack. That means making charges stick often requires a lucky break for investigators.
"This is going to be very difficult unless we have those within this chain come forward," Blair said, "and either they are informants, or they come forward through human intelligence and communications, or say that the process went haywire and they felt like they were being trafficked."
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