Fourteen days.
That's how long a Chinese national could stay in the Northern Mariana Islands without a visa. It was just long enough to land on Saipan, have a baby, pick up an American birth certificate and fly home. Think of it as a two-week all-inclusive, with an American passport as the souvenir.
Plenty of people booked it. In 2009, fewer than 10 babies were born to Chinese mothers on the islands. By 2018, it was almost 600. That year more than 70% of all babies born there had Chinese birth tourists for mothers.
And Saipan was just one stop. Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer estimates that about 100,000 Chinese nationals engage in birth tourism in America every year. Over 13 years, he puts the total at between 750,000 and 1.5 million U.S. citizenships.
On October 30, the Trump administration shut the Saipan route down.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin suspended the visa-free program that let Chinese nationals onto the islands without ever facing a consular officer. "American citizenship is not a travel perk," Mullin said. New applications are frozen, existing authorizations are being canceled, and Chinese visitors now need a real visa like everyone else.
The program started under Obama in 2009, when Chinese tourists were first waved onto the islands without visas. In January 2024, the Biden administration made it permanent in federal regulations and gave it a name only Washington could love: the CNMI Economic Vitality & Security Travel Authorization Program. More than 3,000 Chinese nationals came through it in fiscal year 2025 alone.
Trump's DHS killed it less than two years after Biden launched it.
Consider what that passport buys. An American citizen born on Saipan can be raised entirely in China. At 18, they can come back and vote. At 21, they can start sponsoring their parents for green cards. And they grow up in a country whose 2017 National Intelligence Law requires every Chinese citizen to support and cooperate with Beijing's intelligence work.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah summed it up: "America is not a nursery for the Chinese Communist Party to steal citizenship."
Lee, Rick Scott of Florida, John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana had written to DHS and the Interior Department on April 22, demanding the program be shut down. Visa-free travel, they wrote, is "a benefit that should not be afforded to a recalcitrant country like Communist China." Six months later, it's gone.
All of this comes four months after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump's executive order ending automatic birthright citizenship. "We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright," Trump said.
Read the opinions, though, and it gets interesting. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sided with the majority, wrote that Trump's order didn't violate the 14th Amendment. His objection was to a federal statute from 1940, and he noted that Congress could amend it. One of the six votes against Trump spelled out how to fix the problem.
Trump kept moving while Congress catches up. On August 6, he signed a new executive order on birthright citizenship, and left-wing immigration groups sued to block it almost immediately. In September, the State Department announced visa restrictions on birth tourism facilitators, the people selling the packages.
"The Trump administration is using every tool at our disposal to defend the integrity of U.S. citizenship," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
Trump has been fighting this one for a while. In January 2019, his Justice Department charged 19 people in Southern California for running birth tourism schemes that coached Chinese mothers on how to get past U.S. immigration officers. A year later, his State Department started denying tourist visas to women traveling mainly to give birth here.
Obama opened the door in 2009. Biden wrote it into federal regulations in 2024. Trump's DHS closed it on October 30, 2026, at 2 p.m. Eastern.
