Greg Abbott Just Turned the Supreme Court’s Birthright Defeat Into a Nightmare for Texas Hospitals

The Supreme Court told Trump he had no power to stop birthright citizenship.

Greg Abbott just found the workaround Washington missed entirely.

Texas hospitals selling citizenship to foreign nationals are about to learn what that workaround costs them.

Mission Regional Medical Center Advertised Birth Packages to Foreign Nationals

Greg Abbott signed an executive order Tuesday.

He didn't send a strongly worded letter.

He sent six state agencies after every hospital, doctor and nurse in Texas profiting from the citizenship trade.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission is now hunting for birth tourism schemes.

So is the Department of State Health Services.

So is the Texas Medical Board, the Texas Board of Nursing, and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.

Abbott didn't pick this fight out of nowhere.

Mission Regional Medical Center in the Rio Grande Valley got caught advertising "birth packages" to foreign nationals overseas.

Knapp Medical Center in nearby Weslaco is now under the same investigation.

Mission Regional's response was the corporate shrug you'd expect.

The hospital chalked its overseas marketing up to standard industry practice and claimed the materials are "no longer in use."

Translation: they got caught, and now they're hoping everyone forgets.

Abbott isn't forgetting.

His order lets state agencies pull medical licenses.

It lets them kill state contracts.

It lets them cut hospitals off from state benefits entirely.

"Texas will not tolerate the exploitation of our immigration laws," Abbott said.

He's not talking about desperate migrants.

He's talking about a business model – wealthy foreign nationals buying their children a passport, one delivery room at a time.

A Decade of California Raids Shows Where This Is Headed

The Supreme Court had already blocked Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship outright.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the ruling against him.

Only Amy Coney Barrett crossed over from the conservative majority to join it.

Clarence Thomas spent nearly 100 pages warning that the ruling "devalues" citizenship as the framers intended.

But Brett Kavanaugh's partial dissent left a door open.

Lawmakers could still legislate their own exceptions for children born to parents here unlawfully or temporarily, he wrote.

Abbott didn't wait for Congress.

He went after the fraud instead of the amendment.

Because birth tourism has never been legal – lying to a consular officer about why you're really flying to Texas is visa fraud, and it always has been.

California learned this the hard way first.

Federal agents raided twenty so-called "maternity hotels" across Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties back in 2015.

One of them, a luxury Irvine complex called The Carlyle, housed Chinese women who'd paid between $40,000 and $80,000 for the full citizenship package.

Nineteen people got indicted in that case in 2019.

Dongyuan Li pleaded guilty to conspiracy and visa fraud that same year.

Rancho Cucamonga operators Michael Liu and Jing Dong ran their "USA Happy Baby" scheme for three years before agents caught them.

Liu got sentenced to 41 months in federal prison in 2024 – almost a decade after the raid that caught him.

That's the timeline Texas just refused to accept.

The ACLU Won Its Case and Handed Abbott the Blueprint

Here's what fires me up about this one.

The ACLU spent months in front of the Supreme Court arguing that Trump's order threatened babies born on American soil.

They won that argument.

Now watch what Abbott did with the loophole their own win left standing.

The Supreme Court never said states couldn't police fraud.

It never said hospitals get a pass for selling citizenship packages to foreign nationals like it's a hotel amenity.

Abbott read the ruling closer than the lawyers who wrote it, found the gap, and drove a truck through it.

Six agencies, two hospitals already under the microscope, and license revocation on the table – that's not a press release, that's a threat with teeth.

Every hospital administrator in Texas running a similar racket just got a preview of their own future.

This is what winning actually looks like.

Not a constitutional amendment, not a Supreme Court reversal – just a governor willing to use every enforcement tool already sitting on his desk.

The ACLU thought it closed the book on Trump and citizenship.

Mission Regional Medical Center is about to find out it didn't even read the last chapter.

Sources:

• Craig Bannister, "Texas Gov. Abbott Orders Enforcement Actions Against Birth Tourism," NewsBusters, July 21, 2026.
• Brandon Waltens, "Abbott Orders State Agencies To Investigate Birth Tourism Schemes," Texas Scorecard, July 21, 2026.
• Staff, "Justice Dept., DHS plan crackdown on 'birth tourism' after Supreme Court citizenship ruling," Washington Times, July 1, 2026.
• Staff, "Texas Targets Birth Tourism with New Executive Order," Tennessee Star (via The Daily Signal), July 22, 2026.
• Talia Kaplan, "Chinese woman pleads guilty in California 'birth tourism' scheme, prosecutors say," Fox News, September 17, 2019.
• Staff, "California man sentenced birth tourism scheme affluent Chinese women," Fox News, December 2024.