Tucked away inside an enormous gated mansion on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a couple was raising nearly two dozen children, most under the age of 3, when their shrouded lives were thrust into public view.Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang drew national interest in July after authorities raided their Arcadia home and took 21 kids, mostly surrogate-born, into custody. The raid came after their 2-month-old son was rushed to the hospital with injuries that medical staff suspected were due to child abuse. His trauma was consistent with “either a traffic accident or the child being shaken and/or dropped,” said Arcadia Police Captain Kollin Cieadlo, but “there was no car accident.” The unmarried couple remains at the center of a state child abuse investigation and has drawn federal scrutiny. Meanwhile, over the last six months, the couple has had at least five more surrogate-born babies in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia — all of whom were also taken into state custody.Xuan and Zhang are fighting for custody of their children across four states — and suing some surrogates in the process.Two of those surrogates are now pushing back, seeking custody of the children they carried.Some surrogates say they were deceivedSurrogates Melissa Epps and Stacy King cut off contact with Zhang, Xuan and their lawyers in the weeks before they gave birth to babies in Virginia last fall. They initially refused to turn over the newborns, per court documents.Xuan and Zhang filed separate suits against the surrogates, claiming breach of contract. They demanded custody of the newborns and $1 million from each woman — about 10 times what their surrogacy contracts promised. The couple claims in their lawsuit that they learned of King’s delivery five days after it happened, and they say Epps delivered their baby at a different hospital than they agreed to.The babies have since been taken into state custody. The cases add to the mystery of the couple — with questions still swirling about why they arranged the births of so many children, and for whom. Epps’ attorney described how Zhang and Xuan sought out and persuaded women to carry children for them as hired surrogates — with a pitch she said was misleading. “My client was led to believe that this was a couple who had one child and wanted to have one more,” said Pamela DeCamp, of the Virginia Legal Aid Society. “She had no idea they wanted dozens of children and would never have wanted to do that if she knew.”Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, two more surrogates delivered babies last fall — both are in state custody. And in Georgia, surrogate Hallie Weaver told Courthouse News that she gave birth last summer to a baby boy who was taken into state custody. She said she is also formally fighting to adopt him in the courts. The surrogates were recruited through Facebook, communicating with agencies called Mark Surrogacy and Future Spring Surrogacy. They were each told they’d be carrying a baby for a couple who had either one child or no children — a far cry from the busload living with Zhang and Xuan. Potential surrogates were never told that the surrogacy businesses they were dealing with were actually registered to the couple’s home and office building.But some surrogates noticed oddities as they went through the process. One surrogate, who asked not to be named due to ongoing litigation, said she never met the couple during the pregnancy. After the surrogate gave birth, Zhang “didn’t arrive until the next day.” The postpartum surrogate said she was appalled and refused to see Zhang, who left shortly after with the baby. Zhang declined to comment when reached by phone. A woman at the couple’s palatial Arcadia home twice refused to speak when approached by reporters outside the property, turning around wordlessly each time and walking back into the mansion. A person at an office building owned by Xuan, where Zhang has worked as a realtor, turned CBS News reporters away. The pair’s attorneys in Virginia and California did not respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for the unmarried couple, who immigrated separately to the U.S. from China, have said in court filings that they are interested in building a large family — and that they haven’t done anything wrong. They claim child abuse allegations and media reports are “over sensationalized and false” and insist the pair are likely to win all their cases, regaining custody of every child taken from their care. The biological parents of some of the children remain unclear, but in the Virginia cases, Xuan claims to be both children’s genetic father. The genetic mothers are anonymous egg donors, according to affidavits filed by California Dr. John Wilcox, who wrote that his fertility practice collected sperm from Xuan in 2021.Allegations of violence and abuse: “It didn’t look normal”Records show police responded to at least three dozen calls to the couple’s mansion in less than four years, including noise complaints related to verbal altercations, an anonymous 2024 call alleging child abuse, and a claim that $400,000 worth of wine had been stolen from their 17,000-square-foot estate. In one call made in 2022, a person said they went to the mansion seeking payment for work and were met with a weapon that looked “like a machine gun.” A note in the police report says, “video shows male take a gun from trunk, [unknown] if real.” No charges were brought.Neighbor Chuck Trujillo recalled wondering about the home and its residents when he saw children with crew cuts or short hair “like soldiers” in the backyard. He said it “seemed like they were being trained for something.” Another neighbor, Lorraine Jimenez, said, “The kids were screaming like someone was killing them. This cry was a cry for help, that’s what this was.” Cieadlo, the police captain, said staff for the Department of Child and Family Services “had never seen this many kids in one place.””They were all different genders, but had the same general appearance in terms of their hair being close cut, and the clothing was like shorts and t-shirts, so very gender neutral,” Cieadlo said.For police and child protective services, the issue became urgent in May, when a 2-month-old was brought to a hospital with severe injuries.CBS News reviewed images of the infant in medical care: a brace encases his tiny head and neck. Zhang told doctors that the baby had fallen off a bed while being cared for by a nanny, according to a police warrant. But his injuries more resembled those of a child who had been shaken, or in a car accident, investigators said.An investigator described a short surveillance video clip that he was provided, which showed the baby “shaking/trembling as if he was seizing” in the home before being brought to the hospital. Photos recovered from Zhang’s phone, from two days before the infant was brought to the hospital, show “an apparent head injury,” an investigator wrote in the warrant.A nanny, Chunmei Li, has been sought by police in connection with the baby’s injury. CBS News was unable to locate or contact Li.Other surveillance video obtained by police from within the home shows eight small children, all with closely cropped hair, sitting in a classroom-like setting. In one image, a child appears to have been placed on a table and spanked by a person described as a “teacher/nanny,” one of at least six house staff. In another image, a child who appears to be a toddler does what police describe as “squats,” while in the back of the room, a baby in a high chair appears to be hit in the face by another “teacher/nanny.””There was definitely abuse,” said Cieadlo, “It was consistent with physical and emotional abuse that would go well beyond what a reasonable person would expect to be normal discipline.”Zhang and Xuan “were well aware of what was occurring in that home, and they were allowing it to continue and take place,” he added. Lorraine and her husband, Steve Jimenez, said they witnessed an older woman shaking a baby months before the couple’s arrest. “I was in the kitchen and then I heard the baby screaming,” said Lorraine Jimenez. “When I went outside, she had the baby in her arms and was shaking the heck out of it until I yelled at her, and then she stopped.” Jimenez said she called the police, who told her they would do a welfare check.Trujillo said that he saw adults at the home being aggressive towards the children.”It wasn’t the way you treat a little kid,” Trujillo said. “You didn’t see them holding them. It was more like a drill school. It didn’t look normal.”The neighbors spoke of seeing young children being potty-trained in a single line in the couple’s backyard. Trujillo said the kids weren’t allowed to stand up until they urinated. “They would grab them, pull their pants down and force them on the little potty chairs,” Lorraine Jimenez said.All three neighbors recalled hearing screaming from within the house.Another neighbor said he heard so many kids in the backyard that he “thought it was a kindergarten.”The Arcadia Police Department is actively pursuing a child abuse investigation. Sergeant Mario Castro said the police department recently received FBI translations of audio from the home surveillance videos and is “still conducting an examination on the footage.” Federal investigators have also taken note. The FBI was notified about the couple’s unusual surrogacy setup at least as early as 2023, according to one person who spoke to an agent that year, and its investigation ramped up last year. Four surrogates told CBS News that FBI agents contacted them last year. At least two attorneys spoke to the FBI. A Justice Department source told CBS News that federal prosecutors are tapped into the probe.International surrogacy sparks concerns of child traffickingFlorida Republican Sen. Rick Scott introduced a bill in November that would ban the use of surrogacy in the U.S. by people from certain foreign countries, including China. Scott’s legislation makes a startling accusation about the Arcadia couple.”This presents an acute national security threat, and recent events in Arcadia, California, reveal that surrogacy is even being used to facilitate human trafficking,” wrote Scott without elaborating further.Wealthy Chinese nationals have flocked to America to hire surrogates. A 2024 study published by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine found that, over a six-year span, about 42% of foreign nationals who traveled to the U.S. to work with surrogates were from China, where surrogacy is illegal. A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted Chinese billionaires having dozens of U.S.-born babies through surrogacy.Neither Zhang nor Xuan has been charged, but their legal trouble has continued to mount. In September, the neighboring city of El Monte filed a civil abatement claim targeting one of Xuan’s many properties in his real estate and business portfolio. Police records show dozens of calls to the office building between 2022 and 2025.Lawyers for the city wrote in a Sept. 3 court filing that police had uncovered an “illegal casino” and “indicators of an illicit cannabis and psilocybin operation,” at the building. They said, “firearms had been previously found in various locations and on various persons relating to illegal gambling and narcotics.”The court filing, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, claimed Xuan and other defendants, “acting in concert, operated a well-established, sophisticated, and persistent criminal enterprise that has operated over the course of several years and across multiple properties.” Court records do not show when Xuan arrived in the United States. Zhang arrived in the U.S. in 2016 after marrying another older man, Henry Tang, in 2014. He was 68 and she was 27 years old. The couple moved to nearby Pomona.By 2021, their marriage ended. Zhang’s ex-husband accused her of elder fraud and “trickery” in a lawsuit, claiming she sold their home while he was away in Taiwan. He alleged that she pocketed the money, according to court records.Within months, Zhang and another much older man — Xuan, now 66 — visited HRC Fertility, one of Southern California’s largest fertility chains.It’s not clear if their doctor, Wilcox, was aware of the couple’s ambitions or if he knew how they convinced women to carry children. A representative of the clinic told CBS News its staff does not talk to the media.Not long after moving to the Arcadia mansion, Xuan and Zhang began steadily filling it with babies, according to neighbors and court records. The connected court cases for 19 of the 21 children seized in California read like the alphabet, an identical case number followed by a letter signifying each child’s case: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, and S.We are continuing to investigate this story. 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