Dr. Wladimir Lorentz appeared before a House Oversight task force on Tuesday under subpoena, at a hearing titled "Protecting American Citizenship: Confronting Birth Tourism."
He answered one question.
Chairman Brandon Gill of Texas asked whether he runs a medical business. Lorentz confirmed that he does. Then, for the remainder of the hearing, he responded to everything with a prepared sentence about how a truthful answer might tend to incriminate him.
Here is the thing about that. This is a man who marketed a company called Have My Baby in Miami.
The advertising was not subtle.
Lorentz operated Have My Baby in Miami through Miami Medical Concierge Services. The business offered foreign nationals what the company described as complete logistical support: housing, transportation, medical care, help arranging international health insurance, and a step-by-step guide to giving birth in the United States.
The website's front page ended its pitch by telling prospective clients that the dream of having a child in the United States was closer to reality than they ever imagined.
The same site boasted of more than 2,000 deliveries of international patients. There was a YouTube channel.
None of this was hidden. It was the product. The entire business model depended on foreign nationals finding out about it, which is why he told everyone.
Then Congress wrote him a letter.
Gill's task force contacted Lorentz in May. The website came down shortly afterward, or was at minimum substantially modified.
At the hearing, Gill asked him what motivated the change.
Lorentz declined to answer on the grounds that a truthful answer might incriminate him.
Sit with that one. He invoked his constitutional protection against self-incrimination regarding the question of why he deleted his own advertisement. Not about the deliveries. Not about the clients. About the marketing copy he wrote and then removed.
Gill also asked whether the business helped children of Chinese Communist Party members obtain American citizenship. Same answer. And again on whether the website was his.
Eventually Gill told him there was no choice but to excuse him from the panel, which is a polite way of saying the witness had nothing to contribute to a hearing about his own company.
Two things worth being straight about.
First, the Fifth Amendment is a real right, not a confession. Lorentz is under federal investigation. He has not been charged with anything and he has not been convicted of anything. Any lawyer in America would have given him the same advice, and a movement that spends its time defending constitutional protections does not get to treat their use as proof of guilt when it is inconvenient.
Second, and this matters for anyone tempted to overshoot: giving birth on American soil is not itself a crime. The legal problem is obtaining a visitor visa under false pretenses when the actual purpose is securing citizenship for the child. That distinction is the entire case. It is also why the marketing materials matter so much, because advertising the citizenship outcome is rather difficult to square with the stated purpose of a tourist visa.
The broader point.
Whatever the investigation concludes about one doctor in Florida, an industry exists. Maternity packages. Concierge services. Housing arrangements. Foreign nationals arriving on visitor visas for the express and advertised purpose of producing an American citizen, and a commercial layer of people making money facilitating it.
You can argue about the Fourteenth Amendment all day, and people will. But nobody wrote that clause imagining a website with a testimonials page and a pricing tier.
Congress can address the visa fraud question tomorrow without touching the Constitution at all. That is a legislative fix, not a judicial one, and it does not require a single Supreme Court justice to change their mind.
Lorentz spent years telling the world exactly what his business did. He was, by all accounts, proud of it.
The moment somebody with subpoena power asked him to say it again, the confidence evaporated, the website vanished, and the man with two thousand success stories discovered he had nothing to say at all.
- Article Source:
The Post Millennial
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