WASHINGTON — The House Oversight Committee is launching a probe into four companies profiting from apparent “birth tourism” to the US, in which expectant mothers — many from China and Russia — may be committing visa fraud to obtain American citizenship for their babies.
Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) fired off letters to the maternity firms in Florida, Texas and California on Thursday, asking for records about their marketing materials and “the number of clients serviced and amount of fees collected for childbirth packages.”
“The benefits of US citizenship are a unique privilege,” wrote Comer and Gill, who chairs the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses.
“However, as foreign expectant mothers traveling for this purpose come predominantly from China and Russia, there are concerns that the birth tourism industry is giving rise to potential national security and election integrity threats posed by adversarial nations that challenge US interests,” they said.
“While it is not inherently illegal for a foreign traveler to give birth in the United States, willfully misrepresenting one’s intentions to enter the country on a temporary visitor visa is a violation of current law and considered visa fraud,” they added.
The GOP lawmakers said that websites for each of the companies — Have My Baby in Miami, the El Paso, Texas-based International Maternity Services and Doctores Para Ti, as well as Dr. Athiya Javid’s OB/GYN clinic in San Diego, Calif. — indicate each “is engaged in birth tourism.”
All are marketing their services “explicitly” to foreign mothers, the Republicans noted, and providing additional “legal consultations” and support such as temporary housing and step-by-step instructions for making trips to give birth in the US.
The letter demands a response with documents and communications by May 28.
Tens of thousands of babies are born each year to women in the US on tourist visas. In 2020, as many as 26,000 foreign mothers gave birth, according to an analysis from the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. That figure rose to roughly 70,000 by 2023, that same group found.
A Post investigation previously found 1,000 companies operating out of just one US territory in the Northern Mariana Islands, where “birth tourists” from China have surged since former President Barack Obama’s administration provided a visa-waiver program in 2009.
Have My Baby in Miami, one of the four maternity firms being probed by House GOP investigators, claimed on its website to having conducted 2,000 births for international mothers.
Typically, the mothers from abroad enter the US on B-2 tourist visas or B-1 business visas.
The US State Department, however, bars consular officers from providing the visas to non-resident aliens who are believed to be traveling into the country “for this primary purpose.”
“The Department considers birth tourism an inappropriate basis for the issuance of temporary visitor visas for the policy reasons discussed herein,” a federal rule published in 2020 stated.
President Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 also outlawing birthright citizenship, which led to immediate legal challenges, resulting in a federal judge pausing it from taking effect and a subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court.
Last month, the high court heard oral arguments in one of those cases, during which most justices appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s stance against birthright citizenship.
Trump’s Solicitor General John D. Sauer argued in April that non-US citizens aren’t subject to the jurisdiction of the US and so their children, even when born inside the country, can’t be guaranteed citizenship.
The 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Past Supreme Court decisions have upheld automatic citizenship for the children of foreign nationals born in the US, including the 1898 case US v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the high court held that a child born to Chinese immigrants was a US citizen.
The Post reached out to the four companies the Oversight Committee queried for comment.
