Chinese Couple Dupes Surrogate in Southern California UPDATED

“Kayla Elliott thought she was helping a family who couldn’t conceive by birthing a surrogate child for a couple in Southern California.

Instead, she said, she was caught in a web of deceit that led police to uncover 21 children, who were born to different surrogate mothers, living in the home of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan in Arcadia, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles.

Zhang and Xuan were arrested in May on suspicion of felony child endangerment and neglect after a local hospital called police to report that a 2-month-old baby had arrived with head injuries, Arcadia police said in a statement.

A nanny who worked with the couple is suspected of violently shaking the child, causing the baby to lose consciousness. According to police, the parents were aware of the abuse but failed to seek timely medical help.

A warrant has been issued for the nanny, whom police haven’t been able to locate, police said.

Elliott said Wednesday that she was dumbstruck when she learned the child she bore was among them.

“I was a bit hysterical,” she said. “You just don’t expect that you’re going to go through a pregnancy and a delivery and then hand the baby over to their parents and then all of a sudden find out that there was abuse and neglect going on.”

The surrogacy agency, Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC, told her that the couple had one teenage child and that they had given up on trying to have a second after 10 rounds of failed fertility treatments, Elliott said.

She later learned that Mark Surrogacy was registered at the couple’s Arcadia address.

During their child endangerment investigation, police discovered 15 children at the couple’s house. Six more children belonging to the couple were found in the care of family members and friends. The youngest was the 2-month-old, and the eldest was 13, police said.

“We believe one or two were born biologically to the mother,” Police Lt. Kollin Cieadlo said. “There are some surrogates who have come forward and said they were surrogates for the children.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Zhang and Xuan had a lawyer who could speak on their behalf.

While public records show the business license for Mark Surrogacy was recently terminated, a pregnant surrogate told NBC News the agency continues to contact her.

On Wednesday, KTLA-TV of Los Angeles reported that it received a text message from a phone associated with Zhang that read: “Any accusations of wrongdoing are misguided and wrong. We look forward to vindicating any such claims at the appropriate time when and if any actions are brought.”

After the baby Elliott carried for Zhang and Xuan was born, she learned it was living not in Cuba with the couple but with a nanny and another child of similar age, she said.

Kallie Fell, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Bioethics & Culture Network, said Elliott’s experience isn’t entirely uncommon. She said she has spoken with hundreds of surrogates worldwide who shared nightmare scenarios, including a woman whose surrogate family refused to provide healthy living conditions while she was pregnant.

“There’s so many ways these kinds of things can go sideways, and no amount of law will protect a woman or child, because surrogate pregnancies are high-risk by nature,” she said.

In Elliott’s case, something seemed off as soon as the baby was born, she said. Zhang was hours late for the birth and barely looked at the baby in the hospital room, Elliott said. Before she left, Zhang handed Elliott $2,000 in cash.

“I don’t know what the motive was now, but it was just very, very not what you would expect out of somebody who really wanted a child,” Elliott said. “It was very transactional.”

The child Kayla birthed is now in foster care, and she said she is working on gaining custody of the baby.

The 20 other children are in the custody of a California child-welfare agency while Arcadia police and the FBI investigate the couple and determine whether they misled surrogate mothers around the country, officials said.

Bail for Zhang and Xuan was set at $500,000 each. They were released, Cieadlo said.”
Surrogate was horrified to learn the couple she bore a baby for had 21 children
[NBC 7/16/25 by Emilie Ikeda, Alicia Victoria Lozano and Minyvonne Burke]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update:Previously, I had reported that the company in question was Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC,but in fact it is Babytree, a Chinese company?.. Who is Mark Surrogacy Investment, LLC?Well,it closed. Who is Future Spring Surrogacy? Well it also closed..

 

“This is a story about commercial surrogacy, foreign money, and birthright citizenship colliding in the most predictable and horrifying way imaginable.

President Trump already signed an executive order targeting automatic birthright citizenship. That fight is heading straight for the Supreme Court. And stories like this are exactly why.

Now let’s walk through what actually happened in this creepy mansion.

But before we get into the specifics, we need to understand the scale of what’s happening.

From The New Yorker:In the past decade, a surge of wealthy foreigners—lured by this permissive atmosphere, and by blue-chip medical care—have enlisted American women as surrogates.

The New Yorker calls it a “permissive atmosphere.” That’s the polite and very highbrow way to say “wide open.” America has elite medical care and barely any federal rules around all this stuff. And when you put those two together, obviously people will take advantage. And we’re not just talking about “sweet couples” who want a baby, but big-time global money and baby farming.

The next part is even more important, because it exposes how wide open this entire industry is.
The New Yorker goes on:

But no federal laws govern the practice in the United States. Anyone can start a surrogacy agency; unlike opening a hair salon, or a day care, no qualifications are needed for the intimate, unpredictable work of bringing strangers together to create a new life.

Did you catch that? No federal laws. That means anyone can open one of these agencies. No real qualifications or decent oversight. That’s not some tiny little oversight that’s lost in the fine print. We’ve got a crazy system with the doors wide open. And when you combine wide-open doors and no rules with international clients and automatic citizenship the moment a baby is born here, this is exactly the kind of mess you end up with.

This wasn’t some random connection or a couple stumbling into American surrogacy by chance. All of this is organized, intentional, and built to serve international clients.

The New Yorker piece continues:
Guojun had started working with Babytree, an agency that caters to aspiring parents living in China.

These are agencies that are specifically designed to connect foreign nationals with American surrogates. It’s a streamlined racket. And when those children are born here, they receive US citizenship. That is why the birthright citizenship debate is so important. It’s tied directly to how this sketchy, dangerous industry operates in real life.

Next comes the moment that takes this from unusual to downright disturbing.

By the time police showed up at the mansion, they were trying to get a simple answer: how many children are actually living in this house? What happened next is downright scary.

The New Yorker piece keeps going:

When Calderon pressed her for specifics, Silvia consulted an Excel spreadsheet on her phone before responding that the tally was twenty-one.

A police detective asks how many children you have, and you have to open a spreadsheet to count them. When children are being tallied like line items, there’s a problem, folks. And this is the part of the story when people start asking whether this is about building a family or building something much darker.

One thing this surrogate does is try and keep the language soft and palatable. They use words like “journeys,” “intended parents,” and “growing families.” All of this jargon is wrapped in warmth and good ol’ family sentiment.

But then the New Yorker drops a line that cuts straight through the phony branding and forces you to see what was actually going on inside that creepy mansion.

By collecting children the same way they’d collected properties, Silvia and Guojun had reduced a benevolent act to a purely commercial exchange.

Obviously, to anybody with half a brain, this wasn’t about building some big, wholesome family. This was a baby business built on steady accumulation. The same mindset used to stack up real estate purchases was used for human lives. Little, innocent children. But this is what happens in a country that hands out automatic citizenship at birth. The line between building a family and building assets starts to blur in ways that should make everyone really nervous.

At this point in the story, we start to see the abuse unfold. We are told about infants hospitalized with bleeding behind the eyes and surveillance footage of nannies hitting children.

There are toddlers with shaved heads, food hoarding, untreated medical conditions, and developmental delays. It’s a mansion of horrors.

But despite all that, the machine keeps rolling.

The New Yorker piece wraps up:
Nothing prevents Silvia and Guojun from continuing to expand their family, which is exactly what they’ve been doing.

Even after an infant suffered brain injuries, more than twenty children were taken into state custody. Even after surveillance footage showed violence,the current structure still allows this to go on. And all of this abuse is happening because we allow automatic citizenship at birth. Not to mention, we also have a fertility industry with almost no federal oversight.

As a country, our crazy laws and failure to regulate have turned automatic citizenship and reproduction into an industry.

If wealthy foreign nationals can fly in, hire American women, create children on an assembly line, and walk away with US passports attached, then yes, we have a serious problem.[No , Sherlock!]”

A mysterious wealthy foreign couple and a creepy mansion full of surrogate babies…
[Revolver 2/12/26]

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Doing some digging… and I found this article:
Surrogacy scandal deepens as 6 women now claim they carried babies for Cali couple caught with 21 tots
[NY Post 7/18/25 by Isabel Vincent]

Kayla Elliot ” did think it was a little strange that the organization said it had already chosen a Chinese couple to be the parents of the baby she would eventually sign up to carry.”

“Other children in the couple’s care were abused emotionally and physically by at least six nannies, according to NBC, citing law enforcement sources.

Police rescued 15 children from the sprawling, 10,000-square-foot home in Arcadia, California, an affluent community known as “the Chinese Beverly Hills.””

““We discovered numerous children ranging in ages from 2 months old to 13 years old,” Arcadia police Lt. Kollin Cieadlo said. “Many of the children were birthed through surrogacy and then the male and female at the residence took legal guardianship of those kids.”

One neighbor said the house was set up like a hotel, with multiple ensuite rooms and a front desk run by an attendant, per CBS.

Another six children belonging to the couple had been moved out of the mansion but were located by authorities. Police told local outlets that Zhang was able to show that she is the legal mother on all of their birth certificates. ”

“Two companies registered to the address of the $4 million property — Mark Surrogacy Investment and Future Spring Surrogacy — are no longer active, according to California business records.

Kallie Fell, executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said the situation bears the hallmarks of a trafficking scheme.”

“In China, where infertility rates are high, surrogacy and the sale of human eggs are illegal, which is why many moneyed Chinese couples come to the US to contract surrogates to carry their babies, paying as much as $100,000 to rent a womb, according to a report.[Lovely..NOT]

Police are still looking for Li, the nanny, who remains a suspect, with an arrest warrant issued, while Xuan and Zhang have been released without charges being filed at this point.

A text message credited by local media to Xuan claimed “any accusations of wrongdoing are misguided and wrong.”

Six women have come forward to say they had babies for the couple, according to KTLA news. One surrogate in the Los Angeles area said she gave birth in March, while another had babies in 2022 and 2024 for them.”

“When she showed up for the embryo transfer in California — one of 15 US states where compensated surrogacy is legal — she was surprised to meet an elderly man who she was told was the father, who had provided his sperm along with eggs from a donor.”

“Fell also told how the woman handed $200 to Elliot and each of her children, who were in the hospital room.

Fell said it’s not clear how much Elliot was paid to carry the child, but she had told her that it was “at the lower end” of the pay scale for the service, which ranges anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000, Fell said.”