The Supreme Court Just Upheld Birthright Citizenship. It Left the Birth-Tourism Industry Standing Too.

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara, upholding the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by a 6-3 judgment. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the controlling opinion on constitutional grounds, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson. Justice Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment only, resting his vote on narrower statutory grounds. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented separately. The Trump administration’s attempt to end automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents unlawfully or temporarily present is dead.

The ruling settled the constitutional question the administration put before the Court. It did nothing to touch a separate, already-documented industry that depends on the same clause: birth tourism — foreign nationals who travel to the United States for the specific purpose of giving birth so their child receives automatic U.S. citizenship. The Justice Department has spent a decade prosecuting the operators of that industry. None of those prosecutions were before the Court, and nothing in Barbara disturbs them.

This story does two things carefully. First, it lays out what is actually documented: a decade of DOJ birth-tourism prosecutions, a Senate report on the taxpayer cost, and no official government count of how large the industry is. Second, it reports — by name, and labeled as exactly what it is — a stated concern from Border Czar Tom Homan and author Peter Schweizer that Chinese and Russian intelligence services could exploit birth tourism to plant future American citizens. That is a concern, not a proven case. Analysts on record say plainly that no birth-tourism-to-espionage case has ever been documented, and this story says so as clearly as it reports the concern itself.

• 6-3 — the judgment in Trump v. Barbara upholding birthright citizenship; Roberts wrote the controlling opinion on constitutional grounds, Kavanaugh concurred only on statutory grounds · Source: SCOTUS opinion
• $3 million — wired from China to “You Win USA” operator Chao “Edwin” Chen over two years, per DOJ charging documents; Chen pleaded guilty to visa and marriage fraud · Source: DOJ
• 8,000 women — brought to the U.S. since roughly 1999 through the “Star Baby Care” scheme, whose clientele DOJ charging papers say included people tied to Chinese state media, telecom, and banking institutions · Source: DOJ
• 20,000–26,000 — estimated annual birth-tourism births per the Center for Immigration Studies — a disputed, unofficial figure; the federal government keeps no official count · Source: FactCheck.org
• Zero — documented cases of a person born through a birth-tourism scheme later recruited, trained, or activated as a foreign intelligence asset, according to immigration-policy analysts · Source: FactCheck.org
• 48 months — the federal sentence for Yaoning “Mike” Sun, convicted of acting as an unregistered PRC agent — a real influence-operations case unrelated to birth tourism · Source: DOJ

Trump v. Barbara, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), tested the administration’s executive order narrowing birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. The Court rejected it, 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts’s controlling opinion rested on constitutional grounds — the Citizenship Clause means what it has been read to mean since United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 — and was joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson. Justice Kavanaugh supplied the sixth vote for the judgment but wrote separately, resting his agreement on statutory rather than constitutional grounds. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented, each in a separate opinion.

Vice President JD Vance (R) called the outcome a “major, major mistake,” arguing that birthright citizenship is “fundamentally a loophole… that rewards illegal aliens just because they have a baby in the United States.” President Trump reacted on Truth Social that Congress could still act through legislation, adding sarcastically that he’d like to “congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN.” Those posts are paraphrased below, in §06, where the full political reaction is laid out. The point for this section is narrower: the constitutional question is now resolved, and it resolved against the administration.

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The birth-tourism industry the Court’s ruling leaves untouched is not speculative. It is the subject of a decade of federal prosecutions. In 2015, federal agents raided 35 “maternity house” locations across Southern California. In January 2019, the Justice Department unsealed indictments naming 19 people tied to three schemes marketed under the names “You Win USA,” “USA Happy Baby,” and “Star Baby Care.”

The charging documents describe a real business model. “You Win USA” operator Chao “Edwin” Chen pleaded guilty to visa and marriage fraud and filing a false tax return; DOJ says he charged clients $40,000 to $80,000 each and received roughly $3 million in wire transfers from China over two years. “USA Happy Baby,” run out of Rancho Cucamonga, took in $3.4 million in international wires between 2013 and 2014 and failed to report $1.9 million in income; operator Phoebe Dong was sentenced to 41 months by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner. “Star Baby Care” had brought an estimated 8,000 women to the U.S. since roughly 1999; DOJ’s charging papers describe its clientele as including individuals associated with Chinese Central Television, China Telecom, Bank of China, and two local Chinese taxation bureaus. One defendant, Wen Rui Deng, remains a fugitive in China.

These are not immigration-status violations at the margins. They are wire fraud, visa fraud, marriage fraud, and tax cases, prosecuted the way any organized fraud scheme is prosecuted — and they establish, on the government’s own record, that a commercial birth-tourism industry with Chinese clientele has operated in the United States for at least two and a half decades. A 2020 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee report, led by then-Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), put a taxpayer number on it: birth-tourism cases regularly produced hospital-cost write-offs of $25,000 or more per birth, often absorbed by state Medicaid programs and hospital charity-care budgets rather than paid by the parents.

Here is where the story has to slow down, because most of what circulates about birth tourism’s scale is an estimate dressed up as a fact. The Center for Immigration Studies, a restrictionist think tank, estimates 20,000 to 26,000 birth-tourism births per year. The CDC separately recorded 9,576 births to foreign residents in 2024 — a real number, but one that counts all foreign-resident births, not birth tourism specifically, and cannot be read as a birth-tourism count.

FactCheck.org, reviewing the competing figures in April 2026, put it as plainly as it can be put: our federal government has no idea how many birth-tourism births occur each year. There is no visa category for “birth tourist,” no required disclosure of intent to give birth, and no agency tasked with counting. The Migration Policy Institute’s Michelle Mittelstadt offers the opposite-direction caution: birth tourism, she argues, is “a very small occurrence — of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction.” Both things can be true at once — a real, documented, prosecuted industry, and one whose actual size nobody in government can currently state with confidence. Readers should treat any specific figure, including the ones in this story, as an estimate unless it is sourced to an actual government count, because none exists.

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This is the part of the story that most needs precision, because it is the part most likely to be oversimplified into a scare piece. Border Czar Tom Homan has said, on the record: “Birth tourism has been a problem for the three decades that I’ve been enforcing immigration law, especially from Russia and China, where hundreds of thousands of their nationals come to this country just to give birth” — and he has called it “a significant national security threat.” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly put the administration’s position similarly: “Uninhibited birth tourism poses a tremendous cost to taxpayers and threatens our national security.”

Author Peter Schweizer went further in written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on March 10, 2026. Schweizer testified that Chinese Communist Party officials, military personnel, and propaganda officials have used birth tourism over decades to raise an estimated one million U.S.-citizen children inside China itself — children who, in his framing, function as a long-term “asymmetric warfare” asset for a state that could one day activate their citizenship. That is Schweizer’s allegation, made under oath to a Senate subcommittee; it is not a government finding. FactCheck.org and the Migration Policy Institute both dispute the methodology behind the one-million figure as unsubstantiated by any actual government data set, and no federal agency has endorsed it.

Here is the sentence this story will not soften: no documented case exists of a specific individual born through a birth-tourism scheme later being recruited, trained, or activated as a foreign intelligence asset. FactCheck.org quotes an immigration-policy analyst putting it directly — of the actual espionage and influence-agent cases the Justice Department has brought, “none have followed the pattern of birth tourism being used for infiltration.” Homan’s and Schweizer’s concerns are real, on-the-record, and worth reporting by name. They are concerns about a theoretical vulnerability, not an account of a proven operation. Readers deserve both halves of that sentence, not just the frightening one.

None of that means Beijing has no interest in cultivating access inside American government. It means the documented cases look nothing like birth tourism, and readers should not conflate the two. Linda Sun, a former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), and her husband Chris Hu, were charged in September 2024 with FARA violations, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering, allegedly in exchange for access and favors for Chinese government officials. That case is pending; Sun and Hu are presumed innocent unless and until convicted.

Separately, former Arcadia, California Mayor Eileen Wang agreed to plead guilty, and Yaoning “Mike” Sun was convicted, of acting as unregistered agents of the People’s Republic of China — running a website that posted pro-Beijing content at the direction of PRC officials; Sun was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison, and Wang faces up to 10 years. FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly told Congress, in testimony and public remarks, that China represents “the broadest, most challenging” counterintelligence threat the United States faces, and FBI and academic sources describe Beijing’s “thousand grains of sand” strategy — a large volume of low-level collectors and cultivated contacts rather than trained career spies. That strategy describes a general PRC collection method. It is not, in any documented case, a description of birth tourism. None of the people in this section were born in the United States through a birth-tourism scheme; they were adults cultivated, allegedly, by guilty plea, or by conviction, through access, favors, and money — a materially different mechanism than the one Homan and Schweizer describe as a future risk.

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A separate, unrelated March 2026 case sharpened the national-security debate around birthright citizenship generally, even though it has nothing to do with birth tourism. Federal prosecutors charged Ann Mary Zheng in an alleged bomb plot targeting MacDill Air Force Base; a co-defendant, Alen Zheng, remains at large in China. Both are entitled to a presumption of innocence on the pending charges. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis cited the case in arguing that “automatically granting citizenship to children of illegal aliens born in the U.S.… poses a major national security risk” — a statement about the broader citizenship debate, not a claim that the MacDill defendants were themselves products of a birth-tourism scheme.

With the constitutional door closed by Barbara, Republicans in Congress are pursuing the two avenues the ruling left open: statute and constitutional amendment. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship for children of parents who are in the country illegally or on a temporary basis. Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Tom Tiffany (R-WI) led a 34-member House GOP letter to the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and the Interior demanding answers on Chinese birth tourism in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, centered on Saipan — a U.S. territory that does not require a visa for many Chinese travelers and has drawn scrutiny as a birth-tourism gateway. ICE, separately, told U.S. News in April 2026 that it had launched a new initiative aimed specifically at uncovering U.S. birth-tourism schemes.

President Trump has been characteristically blunt about the ruling. He said on Truth Social that Congress could still “easily make it up… through Legislation” and that “no long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary” — a position that sits somewhat in tension with Paul’s amendment push. In a separate, more caustic post, Trump said he wanted to “congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN” — tying the ruling directly to the same China angle Homan and Schweizer raise.

The Supreme Court answered the question the administration put to it: the 14th Amendment means what it has meant since 1898, and Congress cannot narrow it by executive order. That ruling did not create the birth-tourism industry and did not rule on it; the industry was already documented by a decade of DOJ prosecutions before Barbara was ever filed, and it remains exactly as legal, and exactly as unaddressed, after the decision as before it.

What readers should carry away is the distinction this story has tried to hold onto throughout: a documented fraud industry, a stated and named national-security concern about its exploitation by foreign intelligence services, and zero documented cases of that exploitation actually happening. All three of those things are true at once, and none of them cancels out the others. Congress, not the Court, now owns the question of whether to close the loophole — through statute, through Rand Paul’s proposed amendment, or through the ICE enforcement initiative already underway. We will update this page as any of those efforts move.

“Birth tourism has been a problem for the three decades that I've been enforcing immigration law, especially from Russia and China, where hundreds of thousands of their nationals come to this country just to give birth.”

Border Czar Tom Homan

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