Patel Says FBI Working With Congress on Legislation to Reduce Birth Tourism

FBI Director Kash Patel told senators on Sept. 15 that the Trump administration is working in conjunction with Congress to further address birth tourism.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Patel was asked for an update on the FBI’s current efforts regarding birth tourism. Birth tourism is the practice of entering the United States on a tourism visa with the intention of having a child and thereby securing automatic U.S. citizenship for the child.

“We are following the federal statutes that we have on the books right now, and we’re working with our partners in Congress to draft new legislation to give us new authorities to make sure that we can combat the threat,” Patel said during the oversight hearing.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January 2025 to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and temporary visa holders born in the United States.

However, the Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that the president’s order was unconstitutional. The court determined in the case, Trump v. Barbara, that children born to parents unlawfully or temporarily in the United States are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration has officially defined birth tourism as the entry of a foreign national into the United States on a nonimmigrant visa with the intention of giving birth on American soil or the efforts of a foreign national to facilitate such an entry into the United States.

“We want the United States of America to be open for legal immigration and not for illegal immigration, and we’re going to continue to work to that end and work with our partners in Congress,” Patel said during the Sept. 15 Senate hearing. “We’ve asked them for more resources and legislation, and we need some bolstering in that capacity.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House for comment on the legislation effort but did not receive a response before publication time.

Patel’s comments came in response to a question by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who said on Sept. 15 that she was working in Congress to give Trump additional tools to crack down on birthright tourism.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Blackburn and a group of Republican senators introduced a revised version of the Ban Birth Tourism Act in July. The legislation would remove loopholes that foreign nationals can exploit to become American citizens, according to Blackburn’s office.

Blackburn noted that her legislation would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to “make it clear that any alien engaging in birthright tourism is inadmissible to the country.” Under the legislation, those individuals would also be deportable if they were found in the United States, the senator said.

After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, the Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors to prioritize investigations into birth tourism schemes.

A memo to employees at the department said that individuals coming to the United States under “pretenses” to give birth on American soil and secure U.S. citizenship for their children could face criminal charges.

“The Department of Justice will zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system,” Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division wrote in the memo.

Trump issued two executive orders on Aug. 6 to restrict automatic citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents were legally authorized to be in the country only temporarily or were illegally present in the country.

One of the executive orders, “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” was ultimately blocked by Judge Deborah Boardman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland on Sept. 2.

“The President has tried, through Executive Order, to upend our country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship and eliminate, for large swaths of Americans, the right to citizenship by birth, a right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Boardman stated.

The judge said her ruling prevented the Trump administration from “taking any other action to interfere with, deny, or fail to recognize the citizenship” of children of temporary or unlawful foreign nationals in the United States.

Boardman also suggested that the executive order was “almost certainly unconstitutional” following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June.

The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that between 20,000 and 26,000 babies are born to foreign women engaging in birth tourism in the United States each year.

However, the Niskanen Center, a Washington-based think tank, has disputed the estimate, claiming that it double-counts roughly 10,000 mothers and includes “tens of thousands of long-term residents who cannot possibly be birth tourists.”