# Us Is Denying Passports To Americans Along The Border, Throwing Their Citizenship Into Question



## meka72 (Aug 29, 2018)

*U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question*


Kevin Sieff
August 29 at 4:25 PM
PHARR, Tex. — On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. 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.

In a statement, the State Department said that it “has not changed policy or practice regarding the adjudication of passport applications,” adding that “the U.S.-Mexico border region happens to be an area of the country where there has been a significant incidence of citizenship fraud.”

But cases identified by The Washington Post and interviews with immigration attorneys suggest a dramatic shift in both passport issuance and immigration enforcement.

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.

Juan said he was infuriated by the government’s response. “I served my country. I fought for my country,” he said, speaking on the condition that his last name not be used so that he wouldn’t be targeted by immigration enforcement.

The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents.

Based on those suspicions, the State Department during George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The use of midwives is a long-standing tradition in the region, in part because of the cost of hospital care.

The same midwives who provided fraudulent birth certificates also delivered thousands of babies legally in the United States. It has proved nearly impossible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate documents, all of them officially issued by the state of Texas decades ago.


A 2009 government settlement in a case litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seemed like it had mostly put an end to the passport denials. Attorneys reported that the number of denials declined during the rest of the Obama administration, and the government settled promptly when people filed complaints after being denied passports.

But under President Trump, the passport denials and revocations appear to be surging, becoming part of a broader interrogation into the citizenship of people who have lived, voted and worked in the United States for their entire lives.

"We’re seeing these kind of cases skyrocketing,” said Jennifer Correro, an attorney in Houston who is defending dozens of people who have been denied passports.

In its statement, the State Department said that applicants “who have birth certificates filed by a midwife or other birth attendant suspected of having engaged in fraudulent activities, as well as applicants who have both a U.S. and foreign birth certificate, are asked to provide additional documentation establishing they were born in the United States.”

“Individuals who are unable to demonstrate that they were born in the United States are denied issuance of a passport,” the statement said.

When Juan, the former soldier, 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 thought to myself, you know, I’m going to have to seek legal help,” said Juan, who earns $13 an hour as a prison guard and expects to pay several thousand dollars in legal fees.

In a case last August, a 35-year-old Texas man with a U.S. passport was interrogated while crossing back into Texas from Mexico with his son at the McAllen-Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge, connecting Reynosa, Mexico, to McAllen, Tex.

His passport was taken from him, and Customs and Border Protection agents told him to admit that he was born in Mexico, according to documents later filed in federal court. He refused and was sent to the Los Fresnos Detention Center and entered into deportation proceedings.

He was released three days later, but the government scheduled a deportation hearing for him in 2019. His passport, which had been issued in 2008, was revoked.

Attorneys say these cases, where the government’s doubts about an official birth certificate lead to immigration detention, are increasingly common. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center — U.S. citizens,” said Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville.

Diez represents dozens of U.S. citizens who were denied their passports or had their passports suddenly revoked. Among them are soldiers and Border Patrol agents. In some cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrived at his clients’ homes without notice and taken passports away.

The State Department says that even though it may deny someone a passport, that does not necessarily mean that the individual will be deported. But it leaves them in a legal limbo, with one arm of the U.S. government claiming they are not Americans and the prospect that immigration agents could follow up on their case.

It’s difficult to know where the crackdown fits into the Trump administration’s broader assaults on legal and illegal immigration. Over the past year, it has thrown legal permanent residents out of the military and formed a denaturalization task force that tries to identify people who might have lied on decades-old citizenship applications.

Now, the administration appears to be taking aim at a broad group of Americans along the stretch of the border where Trump has promised to build his wall, where he directed the deployment of national guardsmen, and where the majority of cases in which children were separated from their parents during the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy occurred.

The State Department would not say how many passports it has denied to people along the border because of concerns about fraudulent birth certificates. The government has also refused to provide a list of midwives who it considers to be suspicious.

Lawyers along the border say that it isn’t just those delivered by midwives who are being denied.

Babies delivered by Jorge Treviño, one of the regions most well-known gynecologists, are also being denied. When he died in 2015, the McAllen Monitor wrote in his obituary that Treviño had delivered 15,000 babies.

It’s unclear why babies delivered by Treviño are being targeted, and the State Department did not comment on individual birth attendants. Diez, the attorney, said the government has an affidavit from an unnamed Mexican doctor who said that Treviño’s office provided at least one fraudulent birth certificate for a child born in Mexico.

One of the midwives who was accused of providing fraudulent birth certificates in the 1990s admitted in an interview that in two cases, she accepted money to provide fake documents. She said she helped deliver 600 babies in South Texas, many of them now being denied passports. Those birth certificates were issued by the state of Texas, with the midwife’s name listed under “birth attendant.”

“I know that they are suffering now, but it’s out of my control,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of her admission.

For those who have received passport denials from the government, it affects not only their travel plans but their sense of identity as Americans.

One woman who has been denied, named Betty, said she had tried to get a passport to visit her grandfather as he was dying in Mexico. She went to a passport office in Houston, where government officials denied her request and questioned whether she had been born in the United States.

“You’re getting questioned on something so fundamentally you,” said Betty, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about immigration enforcement.

The denials are happening at a time when Trump has been lobbyingfor 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.

“That’s where it gets scary,” Diez said.

For now, passport applicants who are able to afford the legal costs are suing the federal government over their passport denials. Eventually, the applicants typically win those cases, after government attorneys raise a series of sometimes bizarre questions about their birth.

“For a while, we had attorneys asking the same question: ‘Do you remember when you were born?’ ” Diez said. “I had to promise my clients that it wasn’t a trick question.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html

*Read more*

As border crossings surge, a Mexican couple tests Trump’s policies

Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says

‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news


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## luckiestdestiny (Aug 29, 2018)

This is completely and utterly unacceptable and somehow not surprising.


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## frida1980 (Aug 30, 2018)

They’re going to find ways to come for all of us. Vote them out!


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## intellectualuva (Aug 30, 2018)

That's scary. I'm due for renewal in 3 years. It's so scary to be in legal limbo because you can really leave the country either.


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## Kanky (Aug 30, 2018)

frida1980 said:


> They’re going to find ways to come for all of us. Vote them out!


Come for all of who? It sounds like a significant number of these people actually aren’t citizens.


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## nysister (Aug 30, 2018)

This is insane. The midwives are the only ones who should be charged, if anyone after all this time. There's no way to distinguish, these people are citizens, the gov needs to get over it. Sheesh out of all the real problems in this world.


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## meka72 (Aug 30, 2018)

Kanky said:


> It sounds like a significant number of these people actually aren’t citizens.


I didn’t get that from that article. IMO it’s the administration going after Hispanics when they have no proof that they’re _not _citizens. Legally, the burden should be on the government to prove that those people weren’t born here or that their birth records are fraudulent.


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## intellectualuva (Aug 30, 2018)

My question is what's stopping them from doing this to anyone with a "foreign name"?


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## meka72 (Aug 30, 2018)

frida1980 said:


> They’re going to find ways to come for all of us. Vote them out!


I agree 100%.


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## Kanky (Aug 30, 2018)

intellectualuva said:


> My question is what's stopping them from doing this to anyone with a "foreign name"?


Maybe this will wake the Hispanic Relublicans up. But I doubt it because who cares about being deported from your birth country when someone  somewhere might be having an abortion.


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## meka72 (Aug 30, 2018)

Kanky said:


> Maybe this will wake the Hispanic Relublicans up. But I doubt it because who cares about being deported from your birth country when someone  somewhere might be having an abortion.


Now I definitely agree with you on this.


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## cinnespice (Aug 30, 2018)

I have to renew mines before it expires in March.
I wish they would come for me. 
I'm getting a U.S. passport and a Grenadian one as well its time.


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## FemmeCreole (Aug 30, 2018)

Kanky said:


> Come for all of who? It sounds like a significant number of these people actually aren’t citizens.


Yea ok.


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## itsallaboutattitude (Aug 31, 2018)

I wonder where they going look to deport me?


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## frida1980 (Aug 31, 2018)

Kanky said:


> Maybe this will wake the Hispanic Relublicans up. But I doubt it because who cares about being deported from your birth country when someone  somewhere might be having an abortion.



That’s because Hispanics republicans are white or think they are white so they think this doesn’t apply to them.


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## Kiowa (Aug 31, 2018)

Who is he coming for next? Offspring of US servicemen...

Robert Huynh is the son of an American serviceman, although he never knew his father. His mother is Vietnamese, and he was conceived during the Vietnam War. In 1984, nine years after the last American troops left the country, 14-year-old Huynh moved to Louisville with his mother, half brother and half sisters under a U.S. government program to bring Amerasians and others to the United States. 

Today, at 48, with a son and two young grandsons in Kentucky, he faces the prospect of being sent back to Vietnam, a country he has not visited since he left and where he has no relatives or friends. 

Huynh is one of about 8,000 Vietnamese potentially caught up in a tough new immigration policy adopted by the Trump administration, significantly escalating deportation proceedings against immigrants who have green cards but never became U.S. citizens, and who have violated U.S. law. 
... 

“My mother is 83 years old right now, and I want to be here when she passes away,” he said by telephone from Houston. “I don’t have anybody in Vietnam. My life is here in the United States.”









*https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...513a40042f6_story.html?utm_term=.b2518c3712fe*


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## nysister (Aug 31, 2018)

This is insane. I read how Bank of America is freezing accounts of people that they feel are here illegally. Even when it's not so, even when you don't have to be American or even a visa holder to have a bank account here!


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## yamilee21 (Sep 4, 2018)

Apparently the criteria is a "Spanish" last name, even though there have been Spanish names in the area since well before it was a part of the United States. A white woman in Texas is also unable to obtain passports for her young sons, who have their father's Spanish last name. 


> ... My sons have never been outside the United States, but their passport applications were denied by the State Department, pending more evidence of their citizenship, just hours after news broke that the Drumpf administration is denying thousands of passport applications submitted by midwife-delivered American applicants from border states.
> 
> At the heart of the denials are allegations that home-birth attendants in border states provided fraudulent United States birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. The Bush and Obama administrations routinely denied passports to babies delivered by midwives in Texas for similar reasons, resulting in a 2009 class action lawsuit litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union. It argued that the government “was violating the due process and equal protection rights of virtually all midwife-delivered U.S. citizens living in the southern border region.” The government settled, agreeing to develop new protocols that would no longer discriminate against those from border states who were born at home. But The Washington Post now reports a spike in such passport denials to Hispanics under the Drumpf administration.
> 
> The letters from the Department of State are addressed to my children, who have the Hispanic last name of their father.  They are age 4 and 6 and not yet able to read. They say that  “the evidence of U.S. citizenship or nationality you submitted is not acceptable for passport purposes,” and that “the document you submitted does not sufficiently support your date and place of birth in the United States since your birth was in a non-institutional setting.” ...


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/opinion/weingarten-homebirth-border-passports.html


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## Transformer (Sep 4, 2018)

I can remember during Reagan’s presidency the fake birth certificates business was in full bloom.  Then he gave Amnesty.


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## Farida (Sep 11, 2018)

Transformer said:


> I can remember during Reagan’s presidency the fake birth certificates business was in full bloom.  Then he gave Amnesty.


Yup.

The fake birth certificate thing in Texas has been a thing since the 1960s across administrations.

A dead giveaway for many of these folks was their birth was registered more than one year after they were born. 

For some the midwives confessed to the fraud and for some Mexico confirmed that they had birth records for the same individuals. So you had baby X with a birth certificate issued in Texas showing the baby was born on August 1, 1990 but the date of registration with the state is September 1991. Then you find a birth certificate for baby X in Mexico, showing birth date of Augyst 1, 1990 and registered in Mexico on August 9th 1990. You see the TX certificate signed by a midwife who pleaded guilty to Fraud. Friends and relatives in Mexico admit to the baby's true birth.

For the iffy cases the government should let it go. But some are well-documented.

Oh and anyone who applied for immigration benefits (not a passport)with a birth certificate registered more than one year after birth has to provide additional info to prove their certificate is legit. No matter where you are from.


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## sgold04 (Sep 12, 2018)

https://www.kctv5.com/news/kansas-w...l&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=user-share

They aren’t just denying Latinos along border states. This article is about a woman from Kansas, they don’t show her pic so I don’t know her race, but her name is Gwyneth Barbara. 

I shared this story on my FB Page (sorry, don’t know how to imbed links and I’m too lazy to figure it out) and an Black woman (AA) said this happened to her.


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