Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Thursday that the Trump administration is working on possible restrictions aimed at preventing women in the late stages of pregnancy from entering the United States, describing the effort as part of a broader crackdown on so-called birth tourism. The proposal would represent one of the administration's most direct attempts yet to prevent foreign nationals from traveling to the United States to give birth and secure citizenship for their children, an issue that has become a major focus alongside President Donald Trump's broader push to restrict birthright citizenship. Speaking to Fox News, Mullin said he was working with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to work out how best to implement new rules that would prevent women in their third trimester from entering the country.
"We don't allow sick individuals to come in here if they're coming from an area…that could possibly spread a disease," Mullin said. "My grandson was just recently born, and her OB-GYN didn't want her flying late into her third trimester, so maybe we should be looking at this, they shouldn't be coming in late in their pregnancies, because I think at that point we could cut down on this birthright citizenship." A DHS spokesperson said that while giving birth in the U.S. was not unlawful, the department was focused on addressing potential violations of federal law, including visa fraud. Instead, it targets foreign nationals whose purpose in entering on a nonimmigrant visa is to give birth on U.S. soil, as well as those accused of helping arrange such travel.
It authorizes officials to consider denying or revoking visas and travel authorizations, rejecting travelers at the border, removing people who previously engaged in birth tourism and acting against facilitators. It also permits humanitarian and national-interest exemptions. Leon Fresco, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation and now a partner at Holland & Knight, told Newsweek that the administration has several existing avenues to enforce the order.
Every traveler seeking legal entry must be admitted by an officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Office of Field Operations, Fresco said. If an officer believes someone appears close to giving birth, the traveler could be referred for secondary inspection and questioned more extensively about the purpose of the trip.
"They would put the person in secondary inspection and ask a lot more questions and try to figure that out and potentially even say, ‘Look, you don’t have to take a pregnancy test, but we’re not going to let you in unless you take one,’" Fresco said. "And from that standpoint, those things have been done in the past." Traveling to the U.S. while pregnant is not, by itself, prohibited. Under the existing rule for B-category visitor visas, the determining issue is the traveler’s primary purpose, and that is where the government faces difficulty.
"The government has no evidence of how many babies are born to 'birth tourists,' and also no evidence it is a problem," Amanda Frost, a law professor with a focus on immigration at the University of Virginia Law School, told Newsweek. "But if large numbers of birth tourists are coming to the United States, that means the Trump administration has not been enforcing the law that is already in place. "A federal regulation in place since 2020 bars women from getting tourist visas for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States.
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