A California woman has been sentenced to 41 months in prison for helping Chinese women travel to the United States to have their children.
Between January 2012 and March 2015, Michael Wei Yueh Liu, 59, and Jing Dong, 47, both from Rancho Cucamonga, ran a “maternity house,” a press release from the Department of Justice says.
The scheme “charged Chinese clients tens of thousands of dollars to help them give birth in the United States to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their children.”
Liu and Dong provided short-term housing for Chinese pregnant women. Within one or two months of having children on American soil, the women would return to China.
“Liu and Dong advised their customers on how to hide their pregnancies from the immigration authorities,” the release explains. “Liu and Dong also knew – or deliberately avoided learning – that their customers lied on their visa applications submitted to immigration authorities to enter the U.S.”
The visa applications falsely claimed that the purpose of the women’s trip was for tourism.
While the situation occurred in September, the incident has again made headlines due to President Donald Trump’s executive order against birthright citizenship.
According to the executive order, the Fourteenth Amendment “has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’” In other words, citizenship is not automatically extended to those whose mothers are in the United States illegally and whose fathers are neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents.
The executive order was shot down in court, however, with U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
