A Long Island man has pleaded guilty to running a years-long “birth tourism” scheme through which he brought 117 pregnant women from Turkey to the U.S. to give birth and gain citizenship for their children.
The fee included the cost of transport, visas, medical care, a place to stay for a period before and after the women had given birth, and help applying for citizenship for their children once they had been born, prosecutors said. Birth tourism seeks to take advantage of the constitutional right that grants automatic citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil. Last year, the U.S. State Department amended its rules to allow consular officials to deny visas to any woman they believe is traveling to the U.S. to give birth. — Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini It is not fundamentally illegal for a woman to come to the U.S. to give birth, but prosecutors have gone after facilitators like Aksakal.
Once they had arrived in New York, Aksakal would transport the women to one of seven “birth houses” in Suffolk County on Long Island.