US prosecutors on Thursday said that they had dismantled three secret “birth tourism” networks that illegally offer Chinese expectant mothers the chance to give birth in California so their children will have US citizenship.
In total, 19 people were charged in the schemes, in which families were poised to pay tens of thousands of dollars, California prosecutor Nicola Hanna said in a statement.
The three named “birthing houses” were broken up after an investigation in 2015, which authorities have only now publicly acknowledged.
These organizations allowed foreign nationals, most of them Chinese, to travel to the US under falsely obtained tourist visas, for which they often lied about the length and purpose of their visit. Babies born on US soil are automatically entitled to birthright citizenship.
According to prosecutors, the Chinese networks advised their clients on how to deceive immigration authorities by telling them, for example, to lie during their consular interviews and wear “loose clothing that would conceal their pregnancies” at ports of entry, according to the prosecutors’ statement.
“America’s way of life is not for sale,” said Joseph Macias, a US Department of Homeland Security investigator for Los Angeles.
“HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will aggressively target those who would make a mockery of our laws and values to benefit and enrich themselves,” he said.
Officials cited as an example Dongyuan Li, a 41-year-old woman living in Irvine, California, who used about 20 apartments to house pregnant women.
She rented them to more than 500 women at US$40,000 to US$80,000 each, the indictment said.
It said she received more than US$3 million in wire transfers from China over the course of two years.
Jing Dong, 42, and Michael Wei Yueh Liu, 53, who allegedly operated “USA Happy Baby,” were also arrested.
The indictment said several suspects were still at large, most of them in China.
Additional reporting by AP
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema