US Attorney General Blanche directs officials to tackle 'birth tourism' after SC's ruling on birthright citizenship
Birth tourism is a practice where people, mainly tourists and undocumented migrants, travel to the US to give birth so their children can gain citizenship
The US acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has directed federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers to combat "birth tourism" after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship earlier this week.
Birth tourism is a practice where people, mainly tourists and undocumented migrants, travel to the US to give birth so their children can gain citizenship.
“There’s other things that [the Department if Homeland Security] can do, and the federal government can do in the visa process, and the application process, to try to minimize or limit the opportunity of folks coming here not to visit, and not to do what they’re saying they’re doing on the tourist visa, but just to have a baby that can then be a US citizen,” Blanche said.
More from World“What we have to do as Department of Justice is make sure our agents, our [Homeland Security Investigations] agents that we work with, and the FBI are focused on stopping that,” he added.
Is birth tourism a problem in the US?
In April, a court heard the oral arguments in the Trump v Barbara case, where D John Sauer, the government's lawyer, said “no one knows for sure” how big a problem so-called birth tourism is.
The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank, has documented 20,000-26,000 cases of women giving birth on a tourist visa.
Nonetheless, the practice has become the foundation of the Trump administration's case against birthright citizenship. President Trump's Republican allies have repeatedly raised concerns about birth tourism, despite limited evidence that it represents a widespread or significant problem.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this week, "I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years. You just come onto the soil and have your child, and then they’re they’re able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else.”
SC’s ruling
Lower courts blocked the move by the Republican president, ruling that under the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, nearly everyone born on US soil is an American citizen.
The Supreme Court agreed in a majority opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts that was joined by two other conservative justices and the three liberals on the top court.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” Roberts wrote.
In an unprecedented move for a sitting US president, Trump personally attended oral arguments on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court in April.
With inputs from agencies
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