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See the full story · 1 sourcesThe Trump administration has vowed to crack down on ‘birth tourism’ while offering U.S. residency in exchange for a $1 million contribution
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was hit with an embarrassing community note on X on Wednesday after writing that “American citizenship is not for sale.”
As the crowdsourced fact-check noted, the Trump administration has in fact launched a similar program: the Trump Gold Card , which offers green card-like U.S. residency “in record time” for individuals who contribute $1 million to the government.
Rubio’s message was meant to announce the State Department’s Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force, which he wrote will “review the activity of visa holders, dismantle illegal birth tourism networks, and put an end to this heinous abuse of our nation's laws.”
The task force has already revoked more than 600 visas , Rubio said.
The Trump administration has made cracking down on visa fraud and revoking visas for other reasons a major priority.
This week, it announced the State Department revoked more than 175,000 visas from foreign nationals since the president took office.
That’s quadruple the pace of the final year of the Biden administration, an analysis by The Guardian found .
The majority of the revocations were “due to law enforcement encounters for a range of criminal activity, with assault, driving under the influence, theft, and drug crimes being the leading causes,” the State Department said in a fact sheet on Tuesday.
The announcement noted that officials revoked visas for offenses ranging from political speech to people seeking to be “birth tourists.”
The Gold Card program appears to be getting off to a less successful start.
In April, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said just one person had been approved for the card and paid their $1 million fee, though he added that “hundreds” more people were in a queue to get theirs.
He previously claimed around 10,000 people had signed up for one of the cards in a pre-registration phase.
"I would expect over time that we'd sell, you know, thousands of these cards and raise, you know, billions, billions of dollars," Lutnick told Reuters in December.
The program has faced legal challenges. In February, a group of university professors sued over the offering , arguing it unfairly prioritizes the wealthy and ignores existing immigration law. The Trump administration says the extra fees as part of the Gold Card program do not guarantee shorter wait times.
Overall, the Trump administration has sought to limit the number of immigrants entering the U.S. and increase the number of those expelled from it.
It has revoked Temporary Protected Status from thousands of immigrants in the U.S., who had previously been barred from removal because their home countries, such as Haiti, were deemed excessively unsafe or unstable.
The president has also attempted to shut down the border to asylum-seekers and has paused most refugee resettlement, other than for white South Africans that the administration has baselessly claimed are facing genocide.
The administration has taken other steps, including launching a Justice Department effort to “ prioritize and maximally pursue ” denaturalization cases against American citizens and pushing to end birthright citizenship despite a recent Supreme Court ruling.
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