SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
immigration
Trump’s Gold Card Is Birth Tourism
The president's true criticism about birth tourism is not that it is occurring—it’s that someone else is profiting from it.
Apr 07, 2026
On April 1, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the class-action lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
Trump insists that this ban is necessary to stop birth tourism. This refers to the practice of traveling to another country to give birth, thereby allowing the child to automatically acquire citizenship. Via TruthSocial, Trump writes: “Birthright Citizenship has to do with the babies of slaves, not Chinese Billionaires who have 56 kids, all of whom ‘become’ American Citizens. One of the many Great Scams of our time!”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer has raised similar concerns. He remarks, “Media reported as early as 2015 that, based on Chinese media reports, there are 500—500—birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China, whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation.”
However, despite their criticisms, the Trump administration has effectively launched their own birth tourism venture: the “Trump Gold Card,” a visa program that expedites the process for those “who have demonstrated their ability and desire to advance the interest of the United States” by donating $1 million dollars and paying a $15,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) processing fee. The “Trump Corporate Gold Card” requires a $2 million contribution paid by a corporation “or similar entity” on behalf of the individual. There is even a “Trump Platinum Card” reportedly coming soon. That card will require a $5 million contribution and makes the visa holder exempt from paying US taxes on non-US income for 270 days.
Trump is not ending birth tourism. His true goal is to seize control of the market by monopolizing the pathways to legal residency and citizenship.
Once approved, either variant of the Gold Card provides successful applicants with “lawful permanent resident status” as an EB-1 or EB-2 visa holder. (Specific details for the Platinum Card are not yet available, but presumably it would grant recipients permanent resident status as well.)
This is significant because of how it relates to Trump’s birthright ban. The Trump administration alleges that the 14th Amendment only grants citizenship to those who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US by virtue of owing it “direct and immediate allegiance” and receiving “protection” from it. The children of US citizens and lawful permanent residents meet this standard because their parents have “a permanent domicile.”
Trump’s birthright executive order explicitly carves out this exception: “Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the entitlement of other individuals, including children of lawful permanent residents, to obtain documentation of their United States citizenship.”
Importantly then, the US-born children of Trump Gold Card recipients will be automatically granted citizenship at birth—this is true regardless of how the Supreme Court rules.
Trump is not ending birth tourism. His true goal is to seize control of the market by monopolizing the pathways to legal residency and citizenship. This is a hostile takeover. While Trump decries the problem of “Chinese billionaires” scamming the US to get citizenship for their children, his Gold Card programs allow them to directly purchase it. After all, who else but a multimillionaire or billionaire could afford the $1 million (or $5 million) price tag? Once they obtain lawful permanent resident status, what stops them from giving birth to “56 kids” in the US?
The “Corporate Gold Card” paves the way for even relatively poorer immigrants to gain permanent residency so long as they have skills that companies desire. Rather than curtailing the birth tourism market, Trump is expanding it!
Moreover, a Gold Card applicant may include their spouse or unmarried children (under 21 years old), thereby ensuring they too “receive all of the privileges conferred” by the program. While each family member is subject to another $15,000 DHS processing fee and a $1 million donation, this is unlikely to be a barrier for the ultra wealthy.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick claims, “Our immigration system should put Americans first. That’s exactly why the Trump Gold Card is a major win for our country.” Trump likewise exclaims: “Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They’ll be wealthy, and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money, and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people.”
The irony is that Trump wants wealthy, successful, and talented people to migrate to the US. He wants this regardless of how much his anti-immigrant base despises it. His criticism about birth tourism is not that it is occurring—it’s that someone else is profiting from it.
Ultimately, the Gold Card is gaudy, illegal Trump-branded birth tourism. If Trump were serious about tackling this issue, he would immediately end his pay-for-stay scheme. But he won’t. He will insist, despite any evidence, that birth tourism is rampant and poses an existential threat to the nation; while, at the same time, getting in on the action himself. This isn’t because Trumpian birth tourism is superior or better for the nation. It’s because it’s better for him. In the end, there is only one citizen that Trump truly cares about: himself.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'She Got Ripped Away From Me': ICE Raids Military Base, Cages Wife of Newlywed Soldier Preparing to Deploy
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," said one immigration expert.
Apr 06, 2026
A US Army staff sergeant saw his young wife taken away by immigration agents at his military base in Louisiana last week.
Matthew Blank, 23, who is set to begin training for deployment next month, was preparing to move into his home at the Fort Polk Army base with his 22-year-old wife, Annie Ramos, whom he married just weeks ago.
According to a report out Monday from The New York Times, Ramos is an undocumented Honduran immigrant who was brought to the United States as a toddler. She works as a Sunday school teacher and is months away from finishing a biochemistry degree. She has no criminal record.
Undocumented immigrants who marry US citizens become eligible for green cards and can apply for full citizenship three years after receiving them. Prior to their marriage, Blank and Ramos had already hired a lawyer to begin the process.
Ramos had also applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2020, but her application was never processed after the Trump administration halted it for new applicants.
Blank said he and his wife were following the procedures to get her legal status: "We were doing everything the right way.”
In the meantime, they were planning to begin their lives as newlyweds. On April 2, the couple headed to the base's visitor center to get Ramos registered for military spouse benefits.
They showed Ramos' birth certificate, Honduran passport, their marriage license, and Blank’s military ID. When asked whether Ramos had a visa or green card, they explained that she did not, but that they had completed the application and planned to file it within days. That's when the trouble began.
After the attendant made a "flurry of calls," they were told Ramos would be detained.
Soon enough, she was led away in shackles and taken more than an hour away to the privately owned South Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Basile, where she waits with hundreds of other women who have been rounded up as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort.
"She was going to move in after the Easter weekend," Blank said. "Instead, she got ripped away from me.”
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement following initial reports of Ramos' arrest.
“She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” the statement read. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
The statement also said that Ramos was arrested "after she attempted to enter a military base," seeming to imply she was in the process of illicit activity rather than there as a military spouse.
Ramos had been issued a deportation order in absentia in 2005, when she was 22 months old, after her family failed to show up for an immigration court hearing.
However, experts told the Times that it is very rare for people who have been issued prior deportation orders to be detained and that it's typically easy for them to adjust their paperwork.
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," concurred Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who wrote about the incident on social media.
While prior deportation orders can affect an undocumented person's ability to receive legal status, he said, "discretion is part of the enforcement of every law."
"She got a deportation order when she was a small child. It's quite possible that, like many people, she didn't even know about it. That's a common situation," he explained. "Immigration law has always involved choices about whether deportation makes sense or not."
Citing a YouGov/Economist poll from February, he noted that just 21% of Americans support deporting undocumented people brought to the US as kids, while just 16% support deporting those married to US citizens.
Contrary to previous administrations, which tended to target immigrants with criminal records and recent arrivals for deportation, around three-quarters of those currently in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, according to data published in February.
While there is no complete data on how long the average ICE detainee has lived in the US, the Deportation Data Project found that during the first nine months of the second Trump administration, the number of arrests away from the border increased by a factor of 4.6, suggesting that it was going after undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for longer periods of time.
According to Blank's parents, who were there as their son's young spouse was taken away, even the ICE agents who enforced the order to arrest Ramos did not appear proud of what they were doing.
“They told us that they didn’t have a choice, they said they had to take Annie,” recalled Blank's mother, who said the agents apologized.
“I begged them not to take her,” she said. “They said the higher-ups made them do it.”
Ramos told the Times that she knows no other home besides the United States.
"I grew up here like any American,” she said over the phone. “My husband and family are here.”
The facility where she is being held, run by GEO Group, a multibillion-dollar private prison company, has been the subject of dozens of complaints from current and former female detainees who have claimed they were denied basic medical treatment, hygiene supplies, and edible food.
Others have said they've faced sexual abuse and harassment and were subject to forced labor. In December, a former guard pleaded guilty in federal court to sexually abusing a Nicaraguan detainee in mid-2025.
Ramos' detention comes as thousands of US service members deploy to fight Trump's war in Iran. ICE has also been deployed to military bases to screen the family members of Marine recruits at their graduation as recently as last week.
Blank, who has previously been deployed to the Middle East and Europe, said he was "going to fight with everything I have" to secure his wife's freedom.
"She is going to move in with me. We will start a family," Blank said. "I am going to be with her and serve my country."
Their lawyer has petitioned the court to reopen her removal order, which could freeze her deportation. Until it is reopened, however, she could be deported at any moment.
They have also continued to push forward with the effort to get Ramos a green card. But the guards at Basile have refused to let them bring the completed forms inside to get Ramos' signature.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus said on social media that Blank "should be focused on training today," but "instead, he was forced into a fight against his own government to free his wife."
A GoFundMe campaign created by Blank's sister to pay for the legal fight has raised more than $20,000 since Saturday.
Keep ReadingShow Less
3-Year-Old Abused While Waiting Months to Be Released From Detention Under Trump Restrictions, Says Family
“She was so long in there," said the child's father. "I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.”
Apr 05, 2026
President Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services and its office in charge of providing care for unaccompanied immigrant children have been named in a civil lawsuit alleging that a three-year-old was sexually abused after immigration officials separated her from her mother at the US border, while her father waited for months to be reunited with the child.
The girl crossed the border with her mother last September but was separated from her mother after the woman was charged with making false statements, according to The Associated Press. She was sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates under HHS and places children in foster or shelter settings.
When Trump took office for his second term in January 2025, the average time a child was under ORR's care was 37 days, but as of February children were remaining in shelter or foster settings for an average of 200 days.
The process through which ORR releases children to the care of their parents or sponsors has grown more arduous under the Trump administration, and in the case of the three-year-old, she waited for five months in foster care while the government repeatedly told her father it couldn't make an appointment for him to be fingerprinted.
Court documents state that during that time, the girl reported being sexually abused by an older child who was living in the same foster setting in Harlingen, Texas. She told a caregiver that she had been abused multiple times and had suffered bleeding as a result.
ORR only told her father that there had been an "accident" in foster care. Officials did not tell him the result of a forensic exam and interview of his child, but the older child accused of the abuse was removed from the foster setting.
“I asked them, ‘What happened? I want to know. I’m her father. I want to know what’s going on,’ and they just told me that they couldn’t give me more information, that it was under investigation,” said the father, who is a legal permanent US resident and spoke to the AP anonymously to protect his daughter's identity. “She was so long in there... I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.”
The Trump administration has claimed its new restrictions for sponsors and family members seeking custody of their children who are in ORR's care have prevented traffickers from illegally bringing children into the US and have kept unaccompanied minors safe.
Family members like the three-year-old's father are required to submit to income verification, home inspections, and DNA testing.
The new procedures were immediately followed by a drastic jump in child detention times, according to the AP.
Legal advocates have filed lawsuits challenging the new restrictions on the grounds that they can cause prolonged detention for children. Lauren Fisher Flores, the legal director of the American Bar Association’s ProBar project and the attorney representing the girl's family, told the AP that the organization has worked on eight habeas corpus petitions on behalf of children who have been detained for an average of 255 days.
In the girl's case, the government finally allowed the father to be fingerprinted after attorneys sent a letter to ORR, but still did not provide a timeline for his daughter's release. His lawyers then filed a habeas petition, prompting the government to release the child to her father.
During the legal challenge, the father learned the details of what ORR had called an "accident" that happened in the foster setting.
“To have your child abused while in the government’s care, to not understand what has happened or how to protect them, to not even be told about the abuse, it is unimaginable,” Fisher Flores told the AP. “Children deserve safety and they belong with their parents.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular