The Department of Justice has directed prosecutors to prioritize birthing tourism probes following the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship, which rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to constrain birthright citizenship.
In a memo directed to employees of the DOJ, senior official Colin McDonald said, “Birth tourism schemes exploit our immigration system and violate criminal law. The Department of Justice will investigate and hold accountable those who engage in this unlawful conduct, as well as those who solicit and sell these criminal services to others. I am directing all United States Attorneys and the Criminal Division to work with the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of birth tourism schemes.”
McDonald laid out different charges that can be used against those who are involved in various birthing tourism schemes, and then added, “The Department of Justice will zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system.”
The memo comes after the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship, with Justices Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joining Chief Justice Roberts in his opinion against Trump’s executive order on the subject.
The court ruled, “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.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights— to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today,” the opinion added.
US Solicitor General John Sauer argued for Trump on the topic and said that the clause in the Constitution “did not grant citizenship to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens who have no such allegiance.”
