Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison (R-TX), who is running for re-election this year, told President Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, that he has uncovered “an absolute scandal” in the Texas government, which Harrison says is now “engaged in a coverup.”
Harrison said that after the Supreme Court ruling in June against Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, he was “getting fed up with elected Republicans in the great state of Texas doing nothing more than strongly worded tweets…so I demanded that the governor call a special session, because people are shocked to learn that birth tourism is not a crime in Texas.”
Harrison added, “And we apparently have a thriving birth tourism industry in Texas right now. It’s legal, I think we should not tolerate that and we should use every tool at our disposal to fight birth tourism…I want to make it a felony.”
REP. BRIAN HARRISON (R): The Texas Government Is Advertising Birth Certificates for Illegal Aliens! IN SPANISH.@brianeharrison pic.twitter.com/p8bVuG0MUV
— Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) July 31, 2026
Harrison, who served as the Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the first Trump administration, also said he wants the state of Texas to “stop giving birth certificates to illegal aliens,” and that he has “been calling on the governor to direct his Texas health department to stop issuing these state documents, stop giving them to illegal aliens. He’s refused to do that so far.”
[NOTE: If Abbott were to deny a birth certificate to a child born in Texas, he would be violating federal law. According to Harvard Law School: “A state governor or government official refusing to issue a birth certificate to a child born on U.S. soil violates the U.S. Constitution. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, anyone born in the United States and subject to its laws is a citizen from birth, regardless of their parents’ race, nationality, or legal immigration status.”]
Harrison also complained to Bannon that the state of Texas is “advertising birth certificates to illegal aliens on official government taxpayer funded websites” — and in Spanish.
Bannon asked Harrison, “Are you telling me that the Texas government under Abbott is advertising on these websites, how you actually do this and accomplish this to foreigners who are not U.S. citizens?” Harrison said, “Yeah.”