Politics

Ken Paxton Shuts Down Alleged ‘Birth Tourism Center’ He Says Helped Chinese Nationals

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday that he is shutting down a Houston-area facility he dubbed a “birth tourism center.”

Paxton said in a statement posted to X that he “secured a legal victory” to shut down De’Ai Postpartum Care Center, which operated a birth tourism operation that primarily marketed its services to Chinese nationals and claimed responsibility for over 1,000 “American-born babies.” The news comes after Paxton sued the center in April, alleging it was unlawfully “facil­i­tat­ing the inva­sion of Chi­nese nationals” into the Lone Star State.

Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Birth tourism refers to foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth and obtain citizenship for their babies. An estimated 22,000 to 26,000 babies are born via birth tourism annually across the U.S., an April analysis from the Migration Policy Institute found.

“I will do everything in my power to stop foreign nationals from unlawfully exploiting our immigration system through the scam of ‘birth tourism,'” Paxton said in a statement. “This operation helped Chinese foreign nationals come to Texas to evade our laws. Now, we have shut it down.”

Additionally, the center coached foreign nationals on how to circumvent immigration restrictions, including instructing women to apply for visas “before pregnancy” to evade detection, according to Paxton’s office. The center will now halt its operations and stop facilitating births, per the announcement.

Paxton, who has served three terms as the Lone Star State’s attorney general, is the Republican nominee for Texas Senate in November, when he is set to face Democratic nominee James Talarico. He unseated longtime incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn in a May primary runoff, winning by a landslide 28-point margin.

In July, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott unveiled an executive order aiming to crack down on alleged birth tourism in his state, asserting that “U.S. citizenship is not for sale.”

In July, Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Republican Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick each introduced the Ban Birth Tourism Act of 2026 which seeks to end the practice in the U.S. for good.

“Some birth tourism operations openly target wealthy clients from adversarial nations, including China and Russia,” McCormick wrote in a Sept. 12 op-ed for the DCNF. “They help obtain visas, secure housing, coordinate hospital stays, and complete government paperwork. “

“To be American is more than a piece of paper. It is a bond between an individual and a nation built on a promise,” the congressman added. “When foreign nationals pay a business to manufacture that bond for their child, they are not participating in the American story. They are purchasing it.”