On June 13th, 1866, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, granting birthright citizenship to freed slaves and gutting the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling that had declared Black Americans could never be citizens. The men who wrote it had just watched a country tear itself apart over who counted as human. So they welded in the Equal Protection Clause, a promise that every person on American soil would stand equal under the law. And every person born on American soil would be a U.S. citizen.
That single clause held up nearly every major civil rights win for the next 160 years. It got rid of the “separate but equal” racial segregation of schools in Brown v. Board (1954), legalized interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967), and secured marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the Supreme Court ruled by a thin, thin margin of 6-3 to keep birthright citizenship in America. Read the opinions and it was really 5-4. Kavanaugh agreed birthright citizenship could be revoked. His only caveat was that Congress should do it instead of Trump.
The 14th Amendment survived the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and George Wallace. In June 2026, it nearly did not survive a Tuesday.
Rewind to January 20th, 2025.
Hour one of term two. Donald Trump signed over 20 executive orders, including an executive order aimed at birthright citizenship. The official narrative was that Trump simply dislikes immigrants, and we were expected to nod along and accept that. Never mind that two of his three wives arrived here on foreign passports. Never mind Ivana from Czechoslovakia or Melania from Slovenia.
It’s also rather odd because Donald Trump played a part of actual birth tourism. In 2017, The Daily Beast found that Trump's own properties had been serving as birth tourism suites for wealthy Russians. Nothing was ever done about that. For a man that really cares about birth tourism, that’s kind of an odd choice, don’t you think?
Suppose, for a moment, that this is not about birth tourism at all. Suppose the plan is older, and colder, and more patient than that. Suppose it has parts, several of them, laid out in plain sight, and the only reason we have not seen the whole is that we have been trained to look at one piece at a time.
Birth Tourism
The ink was barely dry when Stephen Miller — the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy — turned up on Fox News with Jesse Watters, insisting immigrants have babies on American soil to milk Medicaid and welfare, then funnel it back to whichever country they actually pledge allegiance to.
The claim was pregnant women come here as tourists with a due date, timing their trips to give birth on American soil and walk away with a lifetime of benefits attached.
Fact Check: From 1994 to 2023, immigrants generated a $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus across all levels of government, paying that much in taxes for benefits they could never receive.
What you don’t see here is everything they did to set this narrative up weeks, and even years before the SCOTUS ruling ever dropped.
On April 10, 2026, an internal ICE email directed Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents nationwide toward a new enforcement priority targeting "fraud, financial crimes, and organized facilitation networks" connected to foreign nationals traveling to the US to give birth.
On June 11, 2026, the State Department published “enforcement action” information on more than 600 cases of “birth tourism” and warned visas will be denied or revoked if childbirth is the primary purpose of travel.
In his interview with Fox News, Miller stated: “that baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones.”
Meanwhile, White House spokesman Anna Kelly stated, “uninhibited birth tourism poses a tremendous cost to taxpayers and threatens our national security.”
Our national security.
Think about the language there. If you didn’t know any better — if you just dropped in and heard that soundbite — you would honestly think they were warning us about armed insurgents. You’d think they were describing some hostile foreign militia.
And that’s exactly how they are treating it. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that they are going to sic the DOJ, FBI, and DHS on pregnant immigrants not even a full 24 hours after SCOTUS upheld the 14th Amendment.
On Wednesday morning, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the administration is prepared to “look at” restrictions on pregnant travelers to the U.S.
They are not the only ones. This is a highly coordinated script being read by many people, so you need to pay very close attention to exactly who is spreading this message and remember their names.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted on Twitter/X that the State Department, “should immediately cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants.”
Just completely cut them off. A blanket ban.. if you happen to be pregnant, no visa for you. Are we going to have federal agents pulling aside every single woman of childbearing age at the airport and demanding a urine sample?
She was joined by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) who went as far as proposing the “Anchors Away” act. They're not even referring to them as children anymore. They aren't human beings who live and breathe and love; to them they are just “anchors.”
Lauren Boebert and Andy Ogles. Aren’t these the exact same people who tell us, day in and day out, that they are proudly, unapologetically ‘pro-life?’
Yes. Yes, they are.
‘As a mother of four children, I believe that life begins at conception, and I will always defend life. Every human being has inherent value and dignity regardless of their stage of development, ability, age, gender, or race.” — Lauren Boebert.
Now ask the obvious question. Where did the script come from?
Because now we this wasn’t just an angry reaction from the right. The April ICE directive came two months before the ruling. The Fox appearances were loaded and ready. The DOJ memo dropped the same night. Somebody had already written the planned thing out. They just needed the Supreme Court to hand them the opening whistle. That somebody has a name. Several names, actually.
The Center for Immigration Studies
Read just the prologue of Project 2025, and you will find the Heritage Foundation’s Advisory Board. On that list, you will find many names, and one of those is the Center for Immigration Studies. It was founded by a man named John Tanton. An ophthalmologist from Michigan who believed America’s biggest problem was the ‘wrong people’ having babies.
“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
— John Tanton, Dec. 10, 1993
In 1979, he founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which is a political lobbying group to push the government against immigration.
In 1985, he spun off the Center for Immigration Studies to be FAIR’s research front. It pretends to be non-partisan, non-biased reporting. They even call themselves, “pro-immigrant.” It’s not. Look at where it came from.
In 1996, he backed NumbersUSA for lobbying. This was the operation designed to send out millions of action alerts and flood congressional switchboards with angry phone calls. They were built to create the total illusion of a massive, spontaneous uprising of ordinary Americans demanding these exact policies.
Each one designed to look like a separate institution. Together, they are one of the the single largest drivers of anti-immigration policy in the United States, and they have been for forty years. Yes, they all still exist today.
Mark Krikorian, the author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal, now runs the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Hours after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s birthright citizenship order, Krikorian told PBS NewsHour the loss “almost a gift to the president,” because it gives him more incentive to deport immigrants before they have kids.
That same night, CIS published a legal breakdown of the ruling, written by Andrew R. Arthur. At the exact same time, the Trump administration’s talking points about “Birth Tourism” used Krikorian’s framing almost word for word.
Miller on Fox. Mullin on Fox & Friends. The DOJ memo to prosecutors. All of it echoed what CIS had already put out. This all comes just as ICE has raised their immigration arrest quota from 1,000 immigrants a day to 2,000 a day. Over 10,000 immigrants were detained in the last week of June.
So, what does the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) actually do?
People like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem throw numbers at us. Fox News loops the same digits under the same faces. The numbers feel authoritative. They are meant to. But where do they come from? The Center for Immigration Studies, of course. The Center for Immigration Studies has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
CIS played a quiet, but significant role in immigration policy during the first Trump administration. Their "79 immigration actions the next president can take" aligned almost perfectly with the executive orders Stephen Miller drove through. They came back for the second term. Of course they did.
They do not use United States Census data. They do not use official government headcounts or verified field reports. The reason is simple. The highly specific, deeply inflammatory things they claim are happening are not tracked by any legitimate agency. No one collects that data because that data, as they present it, does not exist.
So they guess.
CIS builds its numbers from public federal datasets, targeted FOIA requests, leaked documents from inside DHS and ICE, and their own modeling layered on top of survey data. Almost none of it is proprietary. Almost all of it is interpretation dressed as measurement.
The activists invent the estimates. The politicians quote the estimates on the floor of the House. The establishment media reports the estimates as fact. Then the activists cite the media coverage to prove they were right all along. The loop closes. It was designed to close.
They launder opinion through a think tank, convert it into data, and expect you to swallow the whole thing without asking a single question.
You are expected to be frightened. You are expected to be grateful. You are not expected to look.
But if you do look, this is what you find. Pregnant children, some of them thirteen years old, locked in a facility the government already shut down once for neglect, reopened, and filled again. Miller's fingerprints are on that policy too. I wrote about that here.
During that first presidency, Trump created a “zero tolerance“ policy. Thousands of families were separated. There was backlash, because even now, sometimes, there is. Tom Homan responded by standing at a podium inside the Center for Immigration Studies and calling the separations “necessary.”
Approximately 1,360 children of the 4,500 that were separated from their families at the U.S. border during the first Trump administration remain unaccounted for. That is a sentence you can read and then continue with your day. Most people do.
__
This time around?
In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order blocking undocumented immigrants from federal public benefits they were never eligible for in the first place. The White House “fact sheet” backing it up used CIS and FAIR data.
In July 2025, at “Alligator Alcatraz,” Trump claimed the average undocumented immigrant costs American taxpayers $70,000. That figure came straight from CIS.
Trump is not a details man, he is a volume man, and volume works on people who are frightened, which is most people, most of the time.
There is also the personnel. These people move between CIS and the government.
In 2020, Trump nominated Ronald Mortensen, a CIS fellow, as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. That role oversaw the entire U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
Jon Feere left CIS to join ICE as a senior advisor in 2017. When that term ended, he went back to CIS as Director of Investigations. In January 2025, he returned to ICE as Chief of Staff. By December, he was Senior Adviser to the ICE Director. A revolving door.
Julie Kirchner, former executive director of FAIR, another node in the same Tanton network, went on to lead the USCIS oversight office in 2017.
Robert Law served as Director of Regulatory Affairs and Policy at CIS, then moved to the America First Policy Institute. In January 2025, he joined the Department of Homeland Security as Senior Counselor to Secretary Kristi Noem. By September, he was Under Secretary of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at DHS.
Todd Bensman, a longtime national security fellow at CIS, was brought into the administration in June 2025 as a senior adviser to White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan. Just two days ago he joined the Heritage Foundation as a “Senior Research Fellow.”
The think tank writes the policy. The personnel carry it into the building. The building implements it. Then the think tank publishes a paper saying the policy is working. You are not supposed to notice that they are all the same people.
Stephen Miller is the closest thread connecting Trump’s cabinet to CIS, closer than anyone else in the room.
He spent seven years as Jeff Sessions’ communications director, and his job there was to take CIS research and package it for public consumption. He mass emailed their material to Republican staffers across Congress, building a pipeline that moved CIS talking points into the mouths of lawmakers long before he ever walked into the West Wing.
Leaked emails published by SPLC's Hatewatch showed Miller spent ten months feeding CIS research directly to Breitbart, including confidential reports and the personal cell number of CIS’s research director. The editor who received those emails later said “what Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy.”
In the White House, Miller did what he’d trained for. He put CIS researchers on national television and called them experts. He pushed federal agencies to adopt CIS estimates that career officials had already flagged as broken, numbers built on sand, forced into concrete anyway.
In his 2026 Fox News segment with Jesse Watters on "birth tourism," Miller echoed the CIS 2020 estimate of 20,000 to 26,000 annual "birth-tourism babies," though he did not name the source. He never names the source.
And when you look just beyond the surface, you’ll find that it all comes full circle.
And of course, John Tanton’s Organizations (FAIR & CIS) are part of the growing pipeline:
Heritage Foundation → Reagan → Heritage Foundation → Bush → Heritage Foundation → Trump pipeline
The Republican establishment of the 1980s did not disappear. It evolved.
Linda Chavez is the connector here. She ran U.S. English, another Tanton-founded group that fought bilingual education while Tanton served as its president. Reagan made her White House Director of Public Liaison and Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Bush Sr. put her on the National Commission on Migrant Education. Bush Jr. had her run his immigration task force during his 2000 campaign and later nominated her for Secretary of Labor.
You would think after forty years of this, she might retire. But no. The permanent class never retires. Linda Chavez is still right here, today, working at or with a whole host of alt-right and conservative think tanks.
The Federalist Society & Center for Equal Opportunity: She sits as the Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. And under her leadership, they operate hand-in-glove with the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society.
Project 2025: They share the same goals, they write the same policies, and yes, her Center for Equal Opportunity sits right there on the advisory board for Project 2025. Right alongside the Center for Immigration Studies.
Ironically, Linda is currently vice chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative whose mission is to "unmask and confront the alliance of dictators threatening freedom around the world and inspiring people in the US and in other free countries to value and defend their own democracies."
IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO THE GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY
if you read anything in this very long article, I hope it’s this:
John Tanton built these organizations years before I was born. A man I had never heard of, shaping the country I grew up in. His goal was clear, though he dressed it in policy language and foundation letterhead. He wanted to reduce immigration because he believed immigrants, the non-European ones, would eventually outnumber people who looked like him.
“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” — John Tanton, 1993.
This was not his idea alone. It has a name: The Great Replacement Theory. The belief that somewhere, someone is orchestrating the deliberate replacement of white populations in Western nations with non-white immigrants.
It has millions of believers, some of them in Congress, some of them on television, some of them in the comment sections, some of them at Thanksgiving dinner. People like Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller.
In their mind, a baby isn't just a baby. It's a foot soldier coming to replace them.
At the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in July 2019, JD Vance stood at a podium and said, “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.”
Our people. Replace. The language of the theory, stripped of its name, spoken aloud by a man who would become Vice President of the United States.
And his pregnant wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants. He goes home to her every night. Sits across from her at the table. Looks at the faces of their children, who are half the thing he is warning about. Our people aren't having enough children to replace themselves. Which people, exactly. Which selves. Not hers. Not theirs. He has drawn a line through his own household and chosen the side that does not include the woman he married.
So is this what he’s always believed, or is he just pushing the chosen rhetoric?
And this theory did not begin with immigration at the southern border. It began with Jewish people.
The original conspiracy held that Jewish elites were the architects, the hidden hand orchestrating the replacement of white Christian populations from behind closed doors.
Stephen Miller is Jewish. He knows this.
Miller's maternal great-great-grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, arrived in the United States in 1903. An Ashkenazi Jew from the shtetl of Antopol, in the Russian Empire. The Glossers did not suffer the Holocaust. They were already here. Perhaps that is the distance that makes all of this possible in his mind.
At some point the theory shed its first skin and began to target all immigrants. I could not tell you the exact moment it happened. All I know is where we are.
We have a theory born aimed at Jewish people, championed by a Jewish man, aimed at brown families, funded by tax-deductible donations, enforced by the federal government of the United States. If you wrote it as fiction, no one would believe the characters.
But plausibility was never the point, but rather, repetition was. Say it enough times, in enough rooms, with enough graphs behind you, and it stops sounding like a conspiracy. It starts sounding like ‘common sense.’
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
— 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution
You are an amazing researcher, and thank you for your clear insights and the linear way you present what you have found so it is mor easily grasped point by point by the rest of us. This is horrifying to me, mostly because it rings true and consistent to what I have observed. Whitewash the history, pun intended, and this is what we get. The garden of Eden story with misbehaving Adam and Eve should be a reminder that when we want it "our way" and want to control life as we see it, we will always come away short. When when Trump was elected in 2016, I watched the news that next morning and wondered, "As a pastor, what will I be called upon to do as a result of this?" and remembered courageous Christians in Nazi Germany. People thought I was over wrought and taking Trump too seriously. Now I think, hopefully, more Christians are realizing he meant exactly what he said, and continues to do that. What, indeed, will we be called upon to be Christians in a world turned Nazi?
Okay, I’ll bite:
The entire concept of “birth tourism” is laughable. Of course a woman who is 8 1/2 to 9 months pregnant is going through everything involved in air travel (including going through customs in their home country and here) stand in line for however long, then cram themselves into an airplane seat in the coach section, and then fly for however many hours with only an airplane bathroom to use to have the right, nay, the privilege of owning hundreds of thousands of dollars in American currency to a hospital.
I am not excusing the men: I know Markwayne Mullin, for example, has never changed a diaper in his life, much less helped his spouse at all during her pregnancies. And based on photo evidence, Stephen Miller saw his pregnant wife as a human shield. It’s the “mother of 4 kids” (and now grandmother) Lauren Boebert who I don’t get. With that many kids, you’d think she’d remember what it was like to drive for 15 minutes while heavily pregnant, (to say nothing of flying.)