Texas Used Its Health Regulator to Target Hospitals Over Birth Ads
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) referred two Rio Grande Valley hospitals to the state attorney general for investigation, accusing them of advertising birth packages to foreign nationals. Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the referral after a billboard promoting deliveries at Mission Regional Medical Center in Mission, Texas, was found running in Latin American countries.
The billboard was written in Spanish, listed birth package prices, and directed viewers to a website, havemybabyinTexas.com, and a phone number with the Rio Grande Valley’s area code. Both are now offline. Mission Regional Medical Center confirmed it used the billboard but said it pulled the ads “to prevent any misunderstandings,” according to spokesperson Kathleen Avila.
The referral also names Knapp Medical Center in Weslaco. HHSC alleged the advertising began as early as 2023. Neither hospital has been charged with any crime. The attorney general’s office will now determine whether any state or federal laws were violated.
“Regardless of what the Supreme Court of the United States may have said, U.S. citizenship is not for sale in Texas. Texas will not tolerate the exploitation of our healthcare system as a pathway to skirt federal immigration laws.”
Gov. Greg Abbott, official news release, July 2026
Abbott’s statement directly references the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling preserving birthright citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that children born on U.S. soil are citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Texas is now using state regulatory authority to pressure hospitals into compliance with an anti-immigration posture that the Supreme Court declined to impose through federal law.
The hospitals under scrutiny serve communities along the Texas-Mexico border where cross-border healthcare access has long been common. Using health regulators to investigate legal advertising sets a precedent that could deter border-region hospitals from serving immigrant patients at all, even when those patients have a legal right to care.
This strategy also has direct implications for reproductive mobility. Since Dobbs ended federal abortion protections in 2022, the same networks of cross-state and cross-border travel that support abortion access have supported maternal care broadly. A state that can investigate hospitals for advertising deliveries to foreign nationals can apply similar pressure to any facility seen as facilitating reproductive care that crosses political lines.
No charges have been filed. The HHSC referral is a regulatory complaint, not a criminal indictment. But the investigation itself carries weight: public investigation by a state attorney general can damage hospital reputations, affect accreditation, and influence Medicaid contracts, all before a single law is found broken.
What You Can Do Now
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Call the Texas attorney general’s public comment line at (512) 463-2100 and ask what legal standard HHSC applied to trigger this referral and whether any formal guidance exists for hospitals that serve non-citizen patients.
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Contact your U.S. representative at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to oppose federal legislation that would enable state health agencies to penalize hospitals for advertising legal medical services to foreign nationals.
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Reach your Texas state legislators at capitol.texas.gov/Members/Members.aspx and ask them to hold HHSC accountable for using the referral process against hospitals that have not been found to have broken any law.
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Contact the Texas Hospital Association at (512) 465-1000, which represents Mission Regional Medical Center’s health system, and urge them to publicly defend hospitals’ right to serve immigrant patients without state regulatory retaliation.
Sources
Texas Tribune: Texas hospitals investigated over birth tourism billboard in Latin America KFF: Birthright Citizenship and State-Level Immigration Enforcement Policies Brennan Center: How States Use Regulatory Power to Enforce Immigration Policy Texas Tribune: Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship