Let's call it what it is:
The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.
The State Department says there has been no change in policy.
But cases identified by The Washington Post and interviews with immigration attorneys suggest a dramatic shift in both passport issuance and immigration enforcement.
Because of the cost of hospitals in our blighted for-profit medical care system, it is not uncommon for Rio Grande Valley Texans to use midwives for childbirth, and some midwives and doctors who have delivered thousands of legitimate American-born babies also have been caught falsifying birth certificates for people not born in the United States. That resulted in the denial of passports to some Texans during the Obama administration, but after the settlement of an ACLU lawsuit the practice largely ended. Now it is surging.
In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies.
By the same administration that wants to disenfranchise Latino voters and kill DACA, that threatens to and actually deports DREAMers, and that actively works to destroy immigrant families. This is ethnic cleansing. And if this administration is not stopped, it will get worse.