Federal officials on Tuesday, March 3, searched through dozens of Southern California locations, raiding through “maternity hotels,” where foreign women allegedly give birth for the sole purpose of having a US citizen baby, authorities said.
Searches took place in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties. No arrests were made, but authorities say the investigations are likely to result in the largest federal criminal case ever against the booming “anchor baby” industry.
Operators of these enterprises are believed to cater primarily to Chinese women and charge up to $50,000 for travel to the United States on fraudulent visas, lodging and food, according to a statement by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“It’s not necessarily illegal to come here to have the baby, but if you lie about your reasons for coming here, that’s visa fraud,” said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for Los Angeles, according to NBC.
Among locations Homeland Security agents swept through Tuesday included The Carlyle, a luxury property in Irvine, Calif., where Chao Chen and Dong Li run You Win USA, a birth tourism enterprise. Pregnant women and new moms at the site allegedly paid between $40,000 to $80,000 to birth their children in the United States.
“I am doing this for the education of the next generation,” one of the women told NBC News.
Women at the maternity hotels are being treated as material witnesses in the investigation, which is focused on operators of these facilities: they make thousands of dollars tax-free through assisting Chinese nationals in obtaining visas and caring for them until they give birth in an American hospital at a discount, court papers indicate.
Through these enterprises, mothers and mothers-to-be are told what lies to tell to obtain a tourist visa; to enter the country through tourist destinations, such as Hawaii and Las Vegas, to avoid suspicious immigration officers at Los Angeles International Airport; and how to hide their pregnancy, according to a search warrant affidavit. These women typically stay for about a month after giving birth.
Clients are also provided transportation to doctor visits, trips to attractions, restaurants, and shops, court papers say. Their housing, prenatal care and transportation are arranged by the businesses before they leave for the United States. They have also received reduced hospital rates for low-income, uninsured patients, according to the affidavits.
At You Win USA, clients were sent to several Orange County hospitals to deliver and were charged between nothing to $4,000 instead of the full price, which is about $25,000. Investigators said more than 400 babies tied to the scheme were delivered at one facility in a two-year period.
The main draw for “birth tourism” is that the United States offers birthright citizenship.
On the You Win USA website, advantages of a child with US citizenship are highlighted, including free K-12 education, less pollution, low college tuition, government jobs for US citizens, and path to legal immigration for family members once the child turns 21.
“I am a mother, I want to be healthy,” a soon-to-be mother told the Los Angeles Times. “I want my child to be happy. I want air to breathe.”
The probe into the Irvine facility began in June 2014, when the Irvine Police Department received an anonymous tip about the operations that was passed on to Homeland Security. US Customs and Immigration Services separately received a similar tip.
An agent posed as a client who wanted to bring his cousin to the United States to give birth and managed to get Chen to share details of the scheme, including how his China-based employees would prepare the woman for the consulate interview and why she should not fly directly to Los Angeles.
“I don’t do it because it’s too risky,” he said. “That’s because 90 percent of the work is already done before they come over, and if they get sent back on the same plane, then I’m the one to blame for it.”
In Rowland Heights, Wen Rui Deng, Li Yan Lang and Wen Shan Sun, who operate Star Baby Care, were accused of charging women $10,000 to $25,000 to stay at the Pheasant Ridge apartments, according to court papers. The website www.starbabycare.com states it has provided services to 8,000 women, 4,000 of whom are from China, since it was established in 1999, according to the affidavit.
Authorities charged that another enterprise, USA Happy Baby, in Rancho Cucamonga, run by Michael Wei Yueh Liu and Jing Dong, set up at The Reserves apartments.
Foreigners coming to the United States to have babies is not new, but the phenomenon appears to be growing. One affidavit states that about 40,000 of 300,000 children born in the US to foreign citizens are birth tourism babies.
Los Angeles has also seen its fair share of maternity hotels, with an incident in 2013 when the County brought code violations against 16 of these enterprises, which operated as boardinghouses in residential areas. One of those cited was the 600-unit apartment complex in Rowland Heights where 11 units were raided Tuesday.
Tuesday’s raids were the largest so far and were meant more to address the promotion of the maternity tourism industry rather than the women having children.
“It’s a pretty significant step towards making it clear to potential birth tourists that what they’re engaging in is fraud,” John Feere, legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, said of the raids, according to Los Angeles Daily News. The Washington, DC-based think tank advocates for more stringent immigration laws.
“The question remains if the government is not going to prosecute birth tourists from fraud they’ve engaged in, will this act as a deterrent for future birth tourists; I don’t know,” he said.
(With reports from CNN, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal)
(www.asianjournal.news)
(Las Vegas March 5-11, 2015 Sec. A pg.1)
