You were born in the United States. You have a birth certificate that says you born in Texas. You go to renew your passport, and the government comes back and says you are not a citizen. Worse, you go to Cancun for vacation, you get to the border, and are denied entry because ICE says you are not a citizen. What would you do? What can you do?
Sadly, this is not a rhetorical question, or the plot of some dystopian novel. It is a nightmare going on right now along the Texas/Mexico border.
According to the Washington Post:
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.
It’s a safe bet that this is not happening to anyone with a last name of Smith, Johnson, Jones, Miller, or Andersen.
This shameful practice dates back to the 1990s.
In 1992, the INS began investigating midwives in the Rio Grande Valley, which encompasses several counties along the Texas-Mexico border. The agency received information about an exorbitant number of birth records in Cameron County, the farthest south, Trevino said.
An undercover sting operation found midwives were being paid anywhere from $300 to $5,000 to falsify birth records for Mexican children. At least 900 fake documents have been identified.
The investigation targeted 15 midwives. So far(1996), 10 have been indicted. Nine pleaded guilty and one fled to Mexico.
In the end, more than 75 midwives were convicted for falsifying birth records, even though it was impossible to pinpoint exactly which and how many birth certificates were fraudulent.
The convicted midwives were not asked to prove which children they delivered legally, and which ones had been given fraudulent certification in exchange for financial payments.
In most cases, the midwives ended up just guessing, which led to overly-inclusive lists of names.
Immigration authorities did not notify any of the individuals, or their parents, about the placement of their names on these lists – they were never given the opportunity to challenge the inaccuracy of these lists. [...]
Despite providing no basis for their estimate, officials contend there exist 15,000 midwife forgeries stemming from South Texas.
It should be noted that these midwife forgeries did lead to state-issued birth certificates from Texas.
Juan, a U.S. Army veteran, former border patrol agent, and current Texas prison guard ...
… received a letter from the State Department telling him it wasn’t convinced that he was a U.S. citizen, it requested a range of obscure documents — evidence of his mother’s prenatal care, his baptismal certificate, rental agreements from when he was a baby.
He managed to find some of those documents but weeks later received another denial. In a letter, the government said the information “did not establish your birth in the United States.”
I don’t know about you, but when I was 40 years old, I would have been hard pressed to come up with any documentation other than my birth certificate to prove I was born in the United States. I could have asked my mom, but she had dementia, so most days we were just happy if she recognized us, so even she would not have been a reliable witness. Now this would never happen to me or anyone else with a Scandinavian surname in the United States, even if there were discrepancies in the number of births recorded in a county with a large Scandinavian population.
So it all comes down to skin color. The Trump administration can deny it, the Republican Party can deny it, and the sycophants following both of them can deny it, but racism and hate are at home with the GOP, and the dog whistle of citizenship fraud is a clear signal to them that it is okay to question the citizenship of people with brown skin and Latino surnames.
To make this whole thing even more ridiculous, if you can afford to fight this then you end up in federal court, where a U.S. attorney will actually ask you: Do you remember when you were born?
As is always the case with the Trump administration, there is a racist angle to everything he does.
The denials are happening at a time when Trump has been lobbying for stricter federal voter identification rules, which would presumably affect the same people who are now being denied passports — almost all of them Hispanic, living in a heavily Democratic sliver of Texas.
The question is, what do you do if you do not have the money to pay a lawyer, go to court, and fight this?