BORN OUT OF GREED
● 6 L.I. men busted in Turkey-to-U.S. ‘anchor baby’ scheme ● Defrauded Medicaid for $2.1M, feds say
These children were born in the lap of relative suburban luxury — some to mothers who were promised temporary digs with a backyard pool, a massage chair and a piano.
But the best thing of all: They were born American citizens — to Turkish women who sought better lives for their children by giving birth to them in the United States.
Six Long Islanders raked in $750,000 from more than 100 Turkish women eager to have their babies in the U.S. and thus automatically be conferred the privileges of citizenship, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
The scheme also cost the government $2.1 million in bogus Medicaid payouts for which the mothers and their children were not eligible, prosecutors say.
The six suspects advertised their “birth tourism scheme” on Facebook in Turkish from 2017 to 2020, and convinced women to pay them about $7,500 in cash for transit, medical care and help with applying for citizenship for their children born in the United States, according to the feds.
The Facebook group’s name, translated into English, was “My baby should be born in America.”
“If you believe your baby should be born in the USA and become an American citizen then you are at the right place,” reads a translated version of one of the group’s posts.
The post went on to say that pregnant women who used their services would be held in “luxurious” digs in Long Island. At least one of the homes included a backyard pool, a “large and luxurious American style kitchen,” a massage chair and a piano, the post said.
The crew ran seven birth houses in Center Moriches, Dix Hills, East Northport, East Patchogue, Smithtown and West Babylon, according to an indictment in Central Islip Federal Court.
Ibrahim Aksakal, 48, Enes Burak Cakiroglu, 24, and Sarah Kaplan, 46 — all Turkish citizens — helped house the women and also facilitated their transport from Turkey to the states, the feds said.
Fiordalisa Marte, 41, and Edgar Rodriguez, 48, ran the Medicaid part of the scheme, submitting the applications for the women that then got reimbursed by the government, according to the charges.
A sixth defendant, who is not in New York, remains at large.
Though all the pregnant women were Turkish nationals, their Medicaid applications claimed “that the pregnant Turkish Aliens were permanent New York State residents, who had no income, and who resided in one of seven ’Birth Houses,’” according to court papers.
The suspects submitted 99 Medicaid claims for different women claiming that their permanent address was one of the birth houses, the feds said. The feds claim that the group facilitated the birth of 119 children who now have American citizenship.
The investigation into the group spanned more than a year, the feds
a May 29, 2019, conversation with Aksakal in which “Aksakal explained that to enter the United States to give birth, a pregnant Turkish Alien would need to fraudulently apply for a ‘tourist visa,’ before the pregnancy became ‘ obvious,’ ” the feds wrote in court papers.
While it is possible for the federal government to attempt to take away the children’s citizenship, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said there are no plans to do so. Nearly all the women and children are back in Turkey, a law enforcement official said.
Surveillance images taken by the feds show the conspirators outside two of the birth houses. In one of the surveillance photos, Cakiroglu is speaking with a visibly pregnant woman.
“The defendants perpetrated an international fraud that relied upon a parade of women who paid them thousands of dollars in fees in order to enter the United States under false pretenses, to give birth here,” said Acting Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme.
“The defendants cashed in on the desire for birthright citizenship, and the American taxpayer ultimately got stuck with the $2.1 million bill,” said DuCharme.
The defendants were charged with fraud and money laundering and were due in court Wednesday afternoon.
The feds asked the judge in the case to order the defendants held without bail. They all face at least 10 years in prison if convicted on the charges.
Aksakal and Cakiroglu were ordered held without bail by a judge on Wednesday. Marte and Rodriguez were released on $50,000 bail. Kaplan was put on home detention and electronic monitoring for a night and is due back in court on Thursday.
The U.S. first prosecuted birth tourism operators in California in 2019. Authorities said at the time that children born to the business’ customers could return to the U.S. as adults and sponsor their parents for green cards.
Several months earlier, late in 2018, day care worker Yu Fen Wang stabbed three infants and two adults at a Queens nursery that police believed offered birth tourism services to Chinese women. In a lawsuit, one of the victims in the attack claimed the nursery’s owners advertised their services to women in China.