Citizenship is a sovereign right of Nations and must be respected. 'Birth tourism' is nothing but a 'commodity'.

 

Birth tourism is fraud and needs to stop

While the Supreme Court (wrongly) failed to stop birthright citizenship, Congress can and should act to block the travesty that is birth tourism.

Susan Quinn | July 8, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

SCOTUS may have decided incorrectly to approve birthright citizenship, but it also disrespected our Constitution by allowing birth tourism to continue. Although there are some folks who will continue to fight the overall concept of birthright citizenship, our legislators are thankfully already pursuing the banning of birth tourism.

Birth tourism refers to a pregnant woman coming to this country specifically to ensure that her baby is born here and will automatically be a U.S. citizen.

In his dissent to the decision, Justice Samuel Alito pointed out that birth tourism has serious national security implications:

Suppose that a person’s only connection to this country is that he was born here to a mother who was present just long enough to give birth and then quickly returned to her native country. Suppose that country is a strategic adversary or enemy of the United States. Suppose the child never visited the United States while growing up and was inculcated with hatred of this country. According to the Court, that person is a citizen of the United States. He can enter and leave the country as he pleases. He can travel the world on a United States passport. Even if he plots to harm this country, he cannot be deprived of his status as a citizen, at least under current precedent.

Allowing these women to enter this country is a travesty. It devalues the principle of American citizenship because its purpose is to exploit this loophole for personal gain, with our country having no way of knowing whether these tourists truly want their children to be U.S. citizens, complete with all the ensuing benefits. When they return to their home country (usually China), the mothers could also have gleaned all types of information that could challenge our national security.

Part of the problem is that companies have been established to streamline the birth tourism process. For example, a company called “Have My Baby” promised to handle all logistical needs and provide maternity services from start to finish for these foreigners.

To tackle these despicable businesses, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) has been appointed to the new Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses:

It should appall every American to know that there is a thriving birth tourism economy on our soil, perpetuated by foreign nationals who undermine our sovereignty and have no regard for our rule of law,’ said Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, in a press release.

[snip]

Gill and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., last week sent letters to four U.S. entities and businesses ‘that are engaged in and profit from birth tourism.’ Seeking company documents, the lawmakers accuse the delivery centers of exploiting birthright citizenship by ‘explicitly marketing their maternity services to foreign expectant mothers who take advantage of the U.S. immigration system to give birth in the U.S., which gives their child U.S. citizenship.

One way to deal with these fraudulent attempts is to screen visitors, particularly from China, for their intentions for coming to this country. If they misrepresent themselves on their visa applications, claiming they are coming only as tourists and not to give birth, that’s fraud.

How significant is this problem? The Center for Immigration Studies documents 70,000 births to temporary visitors in 2023:

‘Furthermore, if we assume, based on past experience, that births equal about 2 percent of the total temporary visitor population each year, then there have been close to 500,000 births to temporary visitors over the past decade,’ the think tank reported.

Colin McDonald, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement, has been passionate about punishing those pursuing birth tourism and is looking for the organizations abetting those activities. Three cases that he has prosecuted were (1) Michael Wei Yueh Li and Jing Dong were sentenced to 41 months in prison, having charged tens of thousands of dollars to customers; (2) Ibrahim Aksakal spent 27 months in prison for a birth tourism scheme; and (3) Chao “Edwin” Chen whose 100 employees assisted 500 customers in traveling to the U.S, was sentenced to 37 months in prison.

In a different strategy, some legislators have insisted that women should be tested for pregnancy before they enter the country, and prohibited from entering if they are, but that approach may be considered an invasion of privacy.

With the commitment to stop this abuse of our immigration system, we can only hope that a remedy will soon be identified. It’s time to demonstrate the proper respect and honor that U.S. citizenship deserves.

 

Sanctuary Cities illegal alien polices, are just one of the many horrific consequences of this national destructive agenda of the DNC! Numerous URL links (18) deserve your attention.

 

New report shows sanctuary city policies still wrecking American life

Fairfax County, Virginia is in the spotlight today, but the problem is embedded throughout the U.S.

Wendi Strauch Mahoney | July 8, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

America First Legal has been at the forefront of exposing sanctuary-style policies that shield illegal aliens at the expense of American citizens.  Its latest release of records expose Fairfax County, Virginia’s so-called Trust Policy as a formal non-cooperation policy with ICE — one that has endangered the public and, in some cases, carried deadly consequences.  AFL has also documented similar detainer refusal policies in Santa Clara County, California; Cook County, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; and San Francisco, California.  Similar sanctuary-style policies also exist in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Boston.

America First Legal recently released records it obtained from the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office showing that in 2025, Fairfax County refused to transfer 448 illegal aliens who had already been arrested by police and transferred only nine to ICE custody through criminal or judicial warrants.  From January through April 2026, Fairfax declined to transfer another 167 to ICE and transferred only two.  Across those 16 months, Fairfax declined transfer in 615 out of 626 cases — about 98 percent.

The chart below summarizes AFL-obtained Fairfax County Sheriff's Office ICE Detainers Data:

 The policy at the center of the controversy is Fairfax County’s Public Trust and Confidentiality Policy, adopted by the Board of Supervisors in 2021.  The policy is meant to “build trust” by ensuring that migrant residents can access county benefits and services without fear that information they share will be disclosed to federal immigration officials. But the operative language extends to the enforcement of immigration policy, declaring that “it is not an appropriate use of Fairfax resources to facilitate enforcement of federal immigration law.”  It goes on to clarify that the county will comply with valid judicial warrants, subpoenas, and federal or state laws and regulations mandating cooperation but will otherwise restrict information-sharing that could be used for immigration enforcement.

The county’s Trust Policy General Directives go farther, stating that they are designed to “prohibit voluntary cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement” and to ensure that county employees do “not voluntarily cooperate” with enforcement of federal civil immigration laws.

The Fairfax Sheriff’s Office says the same thing in plainer language.  Its policy statement says the office will detain an individual who has a judicial warrant authorizing arrest, including a judicial immigration warrant, but “will not detain an individual based on an informal request or detainer.”  The Sheriff’s Office argues that ICE detainers are requests, not judicial commands, and that holding inmates beyond their release date without judicial authority raises constitutional concerns.

Unfortunately, these policies are typical, not outliers, in sanctuary jurisdictions.  The overarching theory behind many of these policies is that local government should not help federal immigration authorities unless forced to do so by a court order, judicial warrant, subpoena, or mandatory law.

Fairfax is not alone.  AFL’s public-records investigation has exposed the same pattern in other sanctuary jurisdictions.  AFL reports that Santa Clara County, California, received 529 ICE detainer requests from January 2025 through January 2026 and honored none.  Cook County, Illinois refused more than 410 detainers in 2025.  Denver received 219 ICE detainer requests in 2025 and another 55 in the first three months of 2026.  San Francisco denied 671 detainer requests in 2025 and another 196 in the first 61 days of 2026.  Fairfax is simply the latest entry in what appears to be a national pattern of organized non-cooperation.

To be clear, an ICE detainer is not a request aimed at random individuals; it is a notice to another law enforcement agency that DHS seeks custody of an alien already in that agency’s custody for arrest and removal.  Federal regulation provides for temporary detention of up to 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays, so DHS can assume custody.

In practical terms, ICE is asking local authorities to hold someone already arrested long enough for federal officers to take custody in a controlled setting.  When jurisdictions refuse, ICE must either risk allowing the person to return to the community or attempt an at-large arrest later.  That means greater risk for federal officers, greater risk to bystanders, and increased opportunities for repeat offenders to victimize someone else.

The consequences of ignoring detainers can be catastrophic, as Fairfax saw in the case of Stephanie Minter.  In February 2026, Minter, a 41-year-old mother, was fatally stabbed at a Fairfax County bus stop, allegedly by Abdul Jalloh.  According to a February 28 Department of Homeland Security press release, Jalloh entered the U.S. illegally in 2012, and ICE lodged a detainer against him in 2020.

Jalloh’s criminal history includes “more than 30 arrests for charges of rape, malicious wounding, assault, drug possession, identity theft, trespassing, larceny, firing a weapon, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and pickpocketing.”  ICE also said Jalloh was “granted a final order of removal by a judge who found he could be removed to any country other than Sierra Leone.”  According to deputy assistant secretary Lauren Bis, Jalloh’s alleged murder of Minter came “less than 24 hours before Governor Spanberger’s demonization of ICE law enforcement.”

In a similar December 2025 case, Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez, whom DHS described as “a criminal illegal alien from El Salvador, allegedly “brutally murdered a resident inside his home in Reston, Virginia, just ONE DAY after sanctuary politicians REFUSED to honor the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest detainer and RELEASED him from jail,” according to a December 19, 2025 DHS press release.  According to DHS, Morales-Ortez was a “serial criminal” with a history of arrests for “aggravated assault of a police officer, larceny, and disorderly conduct.”  DHS reported that Morales-Ortez illegally entered the country on September 18, 2016 with his mother.  According to DHS, he was designated a “non-enforcement priority” in 2022 when the Biden administration “dismissed his immigration proceedings.”

Prosecutorial discretion in Fairfax may be compounding the issue, as underscored by recent action from the Department of Justice.  The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division recently opened an investigation into Fairfax commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano’s plea bargaining, charging, and sentencing policies.  DOJ says it is investigating whether Descano’s office discriminated against U.S. citizens by offering preferential treatment to illegal alien criminal defendants.  DOJ also emphasized that it has not “reached any conclusions” in its May 6, 2026 letter to Descano.

Fairfax County and other sanctuary jurisdictions should be able to fairly adjudicate illegal alien cases without shielding arrested criminal aliens from federal custody.  They should also be able to comply with constitutional constraints without treating ICE as the enemy.

The effect of non-cooperation is not without serious consequences.  It places citizens and federal officers at greater risk by allowing removable aliens with criminal records and arrests to re-enter the community.  It also sends a troubling message to law-abiding citizens; their safety is subordinate to an ideologically driven refusal to enforce lawful immigration removal procedures.  Couching these policies in the language of “trust” is especially ironic.  Such language disingenuously conceals dangerous policies that deserve far more public scrutiny.

 

Legal immigration can make a nation! Illegal immigration will destroy a nation!

 

Biden-Harris opened the borders. Americans still pay the disastrous price.

New evidence from the Federal Reserve lays it out plainly.

Joseph Ford Cotto | July 7, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

The Biden-Harris administration unleashed a flood of illegal immigration that shattered the dreams of countless Americans.

From early 2021 to early 2024, roughly seven million illegals entered the country. That is nearly double the flow of legal immigration and a scale never seen before in modern times. This was no accident of circumstance. It was the direct result of deliberate Democrat choices that opened the border and encouraged mass illegal crossings. The consequences hit Americans where it hurts most: in their wallets, their houses, and their hopes for the future.

New evidence from the Federal Reserve lays it out plainly.

Using detailed administrative records on individual immigrants and smart comparisons across local markets, the Fed shows that these illegal worker inflows acted like a hammer on housing. For every one-percent increase in local employment from these flows, house prices rose 2.2 percent and rents climbed 1.4 percent during the surge years.

On average, this surge explained about 30 percent of America’s run-up in home prices and 20 percent of the jump in rents.

Think about what that means in real life. A young couple saving for a starter house saw prices explode beyond hope of affordability. Renters watched their monthly bills climb to mortifying heights. This is not social media chatter. It is the difference between affording a place of your own and staying stuck in your parents’ basement.

The Biden-Harris real estate inflation is why many young Americans delayed marriage, put off having children, or gave up on building wealth altogether. Homeownership has always been the bedrock of the American middle class. The blue experiment stole that ladder from beneath the feet of millions.

The damage went deeper.

By flooding labor markets and driving up demand for scarce housing without adding meaningful supply, Democrats supercharged broader inflation. Groceries, gas, and everyday costs soared as communities absorbed the illegal alien spike. Welfare per capita actually fell in devastated areas. As an area’s population grew rapidly, the government’s total aid budget did not increase to match that growth.

Families lost ground in dollars and cents that no slogan about “compassion” can replace. The working and middle classes paid the price while “public servants” cheered America’s decline from a safe distance.

President Donald J. Trump’s team moved swiftly after taking office.

Immigration law enforcement tightened, net illegal immigration turned negative, and the pressure eased. Rents have fallen sharply in major metros. They are down 21.5 percent in Austin, 13.8 percent in Phoenix, and 4.4 percent nationally from Biden-Harris-era peaks. Home list prices dropped in most of the top metro areas with large illegal populations, with declines as steep as 7.3 percent in Austin.

Native-born Americans gained two million jobs in 2025 while foreign-born employment declined. Real wages for blue-collar workers rose at the fastest pace in decades.

These improvements are real and welcome. Yet they cannot erase several years of needless pain. The housing supply did not magically expand during the illegal surge. Construction could not keep pace with the demand shock. Prices and rents ratcheted higher and locked in exorbitant costs for mortgages, leases, and local taxes.

Young people who missed the window for affordable entry into homeownership or family formation lost irreplaceable time. The wealth gap widened, without creating broad-based economic opportunity. This was political fuel for third-worldist communism, masquerading as democratic socialism, which now storms the blue party. Entire communities absorbed strains on schools, hospitals, and public services that will take years to unwind. At best.

No amount of Trump-era progress undoes the hideous, lasting damage inflicted by the open-borders Biden-Harris experiment.

This is not theory. It is cold economic reality documented in administrative microdata and felt in budgets from sea to shining sea. The Democrats engineered a crisis that robbed America of stability and opportunity. They prioritized illegal aliens over citizens. The bill came due in higher prices, deferred dreams, and lost hope. Trump’s administration has delivered measurable relief by simply enforcing immigration law, but the deeper wounds remain.

Every Republican voter, indeed every American who values a secure future, should recognize what is at stake this autumn in the midterms.

The choice is between policies that put citizens first and those that repeat the recent past's catastrophic blue errors. Voting is not abstract. It is the tool that protects your housing costs, your wages, your children's prospects, and the material foundation of American life.

The facts leave no room for excuses. The damage was immense, the reversal is partial, and the lesson is unmistakable: secure borders and enforced immigration laws are non-negotiable for restoring the promise of prosperity. This fall, each GOP voter should show up and cast a ballot to reject any return of the blue policies that mauled the American dream.

The future, measured in home prices, rents, and personal fulfillment, depends on it.

 

Our elected officials create 'pit falls'; they can also correct their fallacies. Let us hope for a speedy recovery!

 

Congress Can Still Ban Birthright Citizenship. Here’s How.

We the People are not helpless. Our representatives in Congress can act. They should do so posthaste.

By Josh Hammer patriotpost.us 7-7-26

The Supreme Court has committed a grievous moral and legal error in Trump v. Barbara, the landmark case on birthright citizenship. In holding that the 14th Amendment confers automatic citizenship on virtually all children born on American soil, the court has severely vitiated the sanctity of American citizenship — in this “America 250” celebration year, no less. Moreover, on a prosaic level, the court’s majority botched the basic constitutional question.

As this column has explained, the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was, per its principal author, Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), “simply declaratory of … the law of the land already.” As for “the law of the land already,” that was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, ratified by Congress two years prior to the 14th Amendment. That statute deliberately withheld blanket birthright citizenship for the children of those who are “subject to any foreign power.”

Thus, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman at the time, Sen. Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.), confidently stated during the amendment’s ratification debate that “subject to the jurisdiction,” the legally relevant 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause language, meant those “not owing allegiance to anybody else.” This is why American Indians, whose allegiances in the 19th century were to their tribes, were not covered; it was not until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that these children were granted blanket birthright citizenship. And if American Indians’ children were not automatically covered, then illegal aliens’ children certainly were not.

This is consistent with the prevailing 19th-century definition of citizenship, which was, as law professor Richard A. Epstein wrote recently for The Wall Street Journal, “an exchange of protection by the sovereign for loyalty of the citizens.” Justice Samuel Alito’s Barbara dissent cogently explicates this allegiance-based conception of citizenship, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate dissent is a masterclass in history.

It is shameful that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett constitutionalized this fraught issue, rejecting Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s middle-ground statutory overture and thus removing the question of birthright citizenship — and all that it now entails, such as the execrable practice of “birth tourism” — from our normal democratic politics. To that extent, Roberts and Barrett have indeed given us a new Roe v. Wade. Under a standard reading of Barbara, the case must be overturned, or a new constitutional amendment passed, in order to preserve the sanctity of citizenship.

But what if the standard reading of Barbara is wrong? President Donald Trump responded to the court’s decision by calling on Congress to act. Most commentators dismissed this out of hand as a paroxysm of rage from an aggrieved party. But the president, it turns out, is actually grasping at an important point. Congress can, and should, act by declaring both illegal aliens and so-called birth tourists to be the functional legal equivalent of modern-day foreign army invaders.

There are four distinct clauses of the Constitution that reference invasion. And while the Supreme Court has never legally defined an “invasion,” law professor Josh Blackman has explained, in surveying the four clauses, that the “Constitution affords Congress, the president, and the states the power to declare an invasion — every branch except the judiciary.” Indeed, in recent years, the state of Texas under Gov. Greg Abbott has done exactly this.

Congress can do the same thing: It can stipulate, under its Article I, Section 8 power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” that it is the sense of Congress that the United States has faced, and still does face, an “invasion,” and that the children of the invaders shall not receive automatic citizenship at birth. Instead, Congress can clarify that those children can apply for naturalization using all extant, generally available means.

How does this square with Barbara? Simple: No serious person claims the children of foreign invaders are entitled to automatic birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 Supreme Court decision frequently invoked (if erroneously) by the Barbara majority and by birthright citizenship defenders everywhere, actually confirmed as much: Justice Horace Gray noted that the “children of aliens within territory in hostile occupation” are not “subject to the jurisdiction,” to use the relevant 14th Amendment language, of “the sovereign whose domains are invaded.”

Put simply, under Wong Kim Ark — and thus under Barbara as well — the children of invaders are not automatic birthright citizens.

Are illegal aliens and/or birth tourists really “invaders”? Reasonable minds will differ. But recall that the Supreme Court has never defined the term — and for good reason, as such a determination is an inherently political question that is, per the 2019 Supreme Court case Rucho v. Common Cause, “outside the courts’ competence and therefore beyond the courts’ jurisdiction.” It would seem that Congress can classify invasion as it reasonably deems fit and, if the president signs the bill, the courts would stay out of the way. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that all nine Supreme Court justices would duck on such “political question doctrine” grounds.

All of this is perfectly consistent with both Wong Kim Ark and Barbara.

The Supreme Court has made a profound error in a case of immense importance. Barbara can, and at some point likely will, be overturned on 14th Amendment grounds. And the passing of a constitutional amendment to overturn Barbara, though perhaps farfetched, is a worthwhile effort even if it amounts to nothing more than a collective flexing of the sinews of self-governance in this milestone 250th anniversary year. But We the People are not otherwise helpless. Our representatives in Congress can act. They should do so posthaste.