Birth tourism scams draw sweeping crackdown as visa revocations climb
The State Department is cracking down on a popular form of visa fraud through a sophisticated worldwide operation that has already revoked hundreds of visas.
The department's spokesman, Tommy Pigott, told Fox News Digital that under the direction of President Donald Trump, the American government is partnering with agencies across the globe to halt the practice of birth tourism.
Birth tourism refers to travel to the United States for the primary purpose of giving birth so a child can obtain U.S. citizenship. The practice has been linked to visa-fraud schemes in which applicants conceal or misrepresent the purpose of their travel, often while seeking entry on visitor visas. A U.S.-citizen child may also create future immigration options for family members, including the ability to petition for a parent after turning 21.
It has also become a for-profit industry, where facilitators of the fraud market their services for helping women break America's laws through "birth in the U.S." services, including arranging visa scams to get women into the country.
"The first step in that is identifying them," Pigott said. "We have consular officers around the world that work with international partners, that work for law enforcement officials to identify patterns that indicate a birth tourism network, and then when that is identified, we take actions such as revoking their visas, which was the recent announcement that we made, to make sure that we're dismantling those networks."
Earlier this month, the State Department announced that it was launching a Birth Tourism and Prevention Task Force.
"We're making adjustments because it's very unfair," Trump said. "They're building businesses around birthright citizenship. That's not the way it was supposed to work. It's a disgrace. They're buying their way in, and we're not going to let it happen."
Through the task force, government officials are now analyzing in real time travel trends by visa holders around the world that are indicative of the practice.
In one recent case, a woman who came to the United States on a tourist visa under the impetus of a weeks-long vacation, continuously received visits from her partner, who lived outside the country. That pattern raised officials' suspicions, who understood the partner's movements as visits to the United States to support the woman in the latter stages of her pregnancy and possibly present in the country during the child's birth.
"That was an indication that this was actually a birth tourism effort here, and we were able to take action to revoke those visas," said Pigott. "So we're able to analyze those travel patterns, analyze those instances that indicate fraud, look into those, and the task force we have allows us to take that action.
Pigott provided some examples of the blatant fraud.
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"There were some advertisements that were being published talking about a world without borders or automatic guaranteed citizenship in their advertisements while they were pretending to offer health care services," he said. "In reality, that is fraud, and the fraud actually doesn't just end when it has to do with the birth tourism example of lying to the consular officer."
"These networks are set up in the United States and then further coach these individuals on how to not pay their medical bills," he continued. "So you have fraud when you enter the United States and then the American taxpayer is left footing the bill. It comes down to the fundamental principle: we're gonna protect the sacred privilege of American citizenship and not allow this fraud to happen."
The task force, officially launched on Aug. 12, has already revoked more than 750 visas tied to suspected birth-tourism activity. The State Department expects that number to increase dramatically in a very short period of time.
Pigott added that under the Trump administration, visa security is an important part of a much broader overall effort to secure the border, adding that the Biden administration, "did everything they could to allow for the abuse of our legal immigration system and allowed for the unprecedented border crisis that we saw."
Under President Joe Biden, an estimated 10 million people crossed the border into the United States illegally.