Birth tourists. Sham marriages. Fake Mexicans. And a Chinese “honeypot” named Fang Fang. Peter Schweizer says they’re all connected, and he shows how on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast.
First, the Trump administration issued an executive order that targets the practice of “birth tourism” and surrogate births, mostly by Chinese nationals, which were exposed in Peter Schweizer’s bestselling book, The Invisible Coup. After the Supreme Court ruled against the administration’s previous order curbing birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, this new order seeks to focus immigration and birthright citizenship rules so they might withstand a future court challenge.
Democrats like California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta characterized the move as “anti-immigrant.” Schweizer fires back:
“Let’s be clear what the attorney general of California’s defending. He’s not defending people who come across the border, live here, have kids, have jobs, and are part of communities. He’s defending women who fly here pregnant and give birth with the express purpose of getting citizenship for their kids,” Schweizer says. “They fly that child home days later, raise them in another country, primarily in China.”
“In other words, these are not people that even immigrated here. They came here for a couple of days,” Schweizer says, just “for the purpose of giving birth.”
The second story is that new Attorney General Todd Blanche indicted 11 people in an alleged decade-long, multimillion-dollar marriage fraud scheme. Prosecutors say this network arranged more than 1,000 sham marriages, allegedly charging Chinese nationals as much as $100,000 for green-card assistance while paying U.S. citizens as much as $30,000 to participate in these staged marriage ceremonies.
Eggers shares that some of the scam marriages even came with pre-nuptial agreements. “And in one of the prenuptial agreements, which the attorney general read from in this press conference, the prenuptial agreement included a man saying to a woman, ‘Listen, after we get married, you’re never to speak to me again,’” he says.
Sham marriages are not the only scam. In New York, a fraud ruling exposed a weird loophole in the law for temporary visa holders, Schweizer reports.
“If you are here on a temporary visa and you are the victim of a crime, or the victim of spousal abuse or sexual abuse, it actually helps you get permanent residence in the United States,” he says. “There were people paying other people to stage violent attacks on them. They would scratch them and do various things to them. The woman then would go to the police and say, ‘This man tried to rape me.’ She would be vague on the description but get a boost in her immigration status,” Schweizer says. “There were people paying thousands upon thousands of dollars, so this is an enormous problem.”
The third story is from a new report written by Simón Levy, who was Mexico’s deputy director of tourism. Levy exposed a fraud and bribery scam involving birth certificates.
“It appears that there’s now some collaboration between Mexican officials and possible Chinese citizens to create another vulnerability for getting into this country,” Eggers says.
Corrupt civil registry officials in several Mexican states, the report says, accepted bribes from foreign nationals to issue genuine Mexican birth certificates, fraudulently presenting the buyer as a native-born Mexican citizen, not a naturalized one.
“Turns out that there were several employees there that were on the take. They were involved in a network that was forging official documents intended for Cuban, Haitian and Chinese migrants,” Schweizer reports. “They took up to $4,000 per immigrant, which is actually not a lot of money.”
“Why does this matter?” he asks.
It matters, Schweizer says, because native-born Mexicans are two to three times more likely than other immigrants to have their US visa applications approved. As the report states, “Four thousand dollars does not buy a document. It buys 49.5 percentage points off your probability of being refused entry to the United States.”
And finally, new documents were released by the White House’s Transparency Task Force late last week that show the length and extent of former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s relationship with Christine Fang (known as “Fang Fang” in Chinese), a suspected Chinese spy at the center of a years-long counterintelligence investigation.
The records, which were released by the White House Transparency Task Force, provide the most detailed public account to date of the relationship and the FBI’s efforts to investigate Fang’s ties to California politics.
Swalwell admitted to having a “physical relationship” with her when he was first interviewed by the FBI, which had been monitoring her activities for espionage.
“She raised money for him, which is illegal because she’s a Chinese national, but she was laundering money through other donation outlets and reimbursing those outlets for the donations,” Eggers says.
Schweizer fills in what else is now confirmed from the declassification of these records.
“Swalwell was a local politician in California on a city council when he first got involved with Fang Fang,” he says. “She apparently showed up at his house late one night, knocking on the door. For some reason, his congressional aides knew that she showed up not wearing underwear. They hooked up.”
The relationship continued when he went to Congress, and she even placed interns in his office.
“He’s sitting on the House Permanent Intelligence Committee, where you get access to all classified information,” Schweizer says. “And there were warning signs he knew this was a bizarre arrangement. According to the FBI, he joked with friends that ‘his new girlfriend worked for the Chinese CIA.’”
“We now know, according to the FBI, that both of her parents were actually employees of the [Chinese] Ministry of State Security,” and that “she had been pressing both him and his dad to take trips to China that she would pay for. He said that that struck him as really odd and weird,” Schweizer reports.
“You would think it would be somewhat humbling,” Eggers says, “if you get caught by the FBI having a relationship with a spy while you’re on the House Intelligence Committee… Instead, he ran for president” in 2020, he adds.
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