OPINION:
When FBI agents raided a nondescript apartment in Arcadia, California, they didn’t find drugs or weapons. They found 21 infants, a host of nannies and the nerve center of a sophisticated international operation designed to manufacture U.S. citizens for Chinese nationals. This wasn’t an isolated incident; it was a glimpse into a new, insidious front in the long-term strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China.
For years, a cottage industry has developed in the regulatory shadows of American immigration law. It has a simple, audacious business model: Sell U.S. citizenship to the highest bidder. Wealthy Chinese clients, unable to use commercial surrogacy at home, are exploiting our laws to create children on U.S. soil. These children are American citizens by birth, but they are assets of the Chinese Communist Party by design.
The mechanics are cynical and brilliant. A Chinese national provides his sperm. An anonymous American woman is paid for her eggs. A second American woman is paid to be a gestational surrogate, a rented womb. The resulting child is a U.S. citizen, genetically half-American, who is then whisked back to China, with a U.S. passport, to be raised, educated and indoctrinated under the absolute authority of the CCP. This is not about building American families; it is about building a Chinese infiltration network.
More than 40% of all international surrogacy contracts in the U.S. were initiated by Chinese nationals. This is not a niche market; it is an industrial-scale pipeline. Cases such as that of Chinese billionaire Xu Bo, who has reportedly fathered more than 100 U.S.-born children to build a “dynasty,” expose the sheer scale and strategic intent. Recently, a California judge, in an act of judicial courage, denied Mr. Xu’s parental rights. She correctly ruled that this was not parenthood but a “serial mechanism” of reproduction.
This pipeline thrives on a deliberate misreading of the 14th Amendment. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was never intended to grant citizenship to the children of those who owe allegiance to a foreign, and often hostile, power. It was meant to secure the rights of newly freed slaves and their descendants.
The Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark affirmed citizenship for the children of legal permanent residents, individuals who had established their allegiance to the United States. It never sanctioned the wholesale creation of citizens by those with no connection, loyalty or antipathy to the United States.
The national security implications are catastrophic. Every Chinese citizen, including these U.S.-born children, is bound by Article 7 of the PRC’s National Intelligence Law to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.” We are creating a class of American citizens who are legally obligated to support and spy for a foreign adversary. After two decades of CCP indoctrination, they can return to the U.S. and seamlessly integrate into our society, eligible for security clearances, government jobs and elected office.
We are handing our greatest adversary a key to every door in our nation. The CCP knows how to play the long game and is happy to wait 15 to 20 years to repatriate those children to the United States as fully committed Chinese-indoctrinated U.S. citizens.
Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican, has introduced the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy Act (SAFE Kids Act), the first and most consequential piece of legislation to directly confront the weaponization of American surrogacy by foreign adversaries. He has identified a vulnerability at the intersection of immigration law, national security and reproductive science and has moved decisively to close it. Reps. Blake Moore, Utah Republican, and John Moolenaar, Michigan Republican, have introduced a companion bill in the House.
No current federal law regulates surrogacy. The SAFE Kids Act is precision legislation. Rather than attempting to rewrite the 14th Amendment or overhaul the entire surrogacy industry, it surgically targets the specific national security vulnerability by voiding surrogacy contracts with nationals of named adversarial nations and imposing criminal penalties on the brokers who facilitate them.
This act shuts down a long-term Chinese penetration strategy and closes an immigration loophole that has been exploited for decades by allowing foreign nationals to purchase U.S. citizenship for their children. This is not immigration; it is infiltration. It is the long-term, strategic seeding of a nation with people whose loyalties, by law and upbringing, are pledged to an adversary.
The SAFE Kids Act is commonsense national security legislation. Every member of Congress should co-sponsor this bill and have the courage to end this egregious vulnerability.
• Emilio T. Gonzalez is a retired U.S. intelligence officer who has served in senior positions in the U.S. Army, on the National Security Council and in the Department of Homeland Security.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.