If you were born in the United States along the border with Mexico, and a lay midwife assisted in your birth, you may have a hard time getting a U.S. passport.
Wary of fraudulent birth documents provided by some lay midwives, the U.S. State Department is challenging the passport applications of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of border residents and requiring additional proof that the applicants were born in the U.S.
The challenges come as Texas border residents hustle to obtain a U.S. passport required by June 1 for travel over the border. And they reflect the government’s concern about the validity of birth documents filed by midwives convicted of selling U.S. birth documents to parents of children born in Mexico.
Immigration lawyers, and even an ex-prosecutor in one high-profile fraud case, say the wide-ranging challenge is unfair.
“I don’t doubt there were cases of fraud, but they are punishing the whole for the faults of the few,” said Cynthia Renteria, an attorney with the Rio Grande Valley office of Houston’s FosterQuan immigration law firm. “There are probably thousands.”
Renteria assisted Houston attorney Naomi Jiyoung Bang win a suit against the State Department brought by Anna Karen Ramirez, 19, a Valley woman whose passport application was rejected last year.
She was finally issued a passport in December, but only after her parents, who live in Mexico, provided extensive receipts from the Hidalgo midwife who delivered their daughter, along with statements from two police officers who witnessed the birth.
75 midwives convicted
One Valley lawyer said the State Department is flagging all passport applicants using birth documents filed by 250 Texas midwives on an internal watch list, including nine in the Houston area. The government has convicted 75 Texas midwives for fraudulent birth records since 1960, according to published reports.
“It’s not fair,” said Bang. “I guess it’s the political tone these days — it’s more exclusionary than admitting — and this is just another tactic.”
The denials trouble Houston attorney Eric Reed, a former federal prosecutor who in 1996 convicted a Brownsville woman investigators dubbed “The Mother of all Midwives” because of 3,400 birth records she filed between 1985 and 1996.
“If the watch list is based on some connection to a convicted midwife, or some actual evidence of impropriety, then applicants may deserve greater scrutiny,” Reed said. “But it strikes me as unfairly prejudicial to delay or deny documents to people simply because they were delivered by midwives, particularly in the border region where that was historically a fairly common occurrence.”
Border residents are flocking to passport offices ahead of a June 1 deadline, imposed by the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, that requires citizens returning from Mexico or Canada to present a U.S. passport. Current regulations at land ports allow use of a driver’s license and a birth certificate to confirm citizenship.
The passport denials brought a federal court challenge by American Civil Liberties Union last year in McAllen, and attorneys are seeking class-action status for tens of thousands of Mexican-Americans delivered by border midwives.
The ACLU suit contends that the government “has effectively reduced to second-class citizenship status an entire swath of passport applicants based solely on their being of Mexican or Latino descent and having been delivered by midwives in non-hospital settings in Southwestern border states.”
State Department spokeswoman Laura Tischler declined to comment citing “pending litigation on this issue.”
The government faces a challenging task in determining citizenship in the border region, where high rates of immigration and poverty resulted in many women having children outside of hospitals.
Margarita Lopez-Perez has hired FosterQuan attorney Bang to file a suit in federal court to have her son, Jorge Morales-Lopez, 42, declared a U.S. citizen.
He was born in 1966 at the McAllen home where she worked as a housekeeper, but a birth certificate was never filed because his birth was assisted not by a midwife, but by another maid.
“What I want is to get help for him to come over here to the United States, because he was born here,” said Lopez-Perez, 72, adding her son was deported to Mexico recently after a marijuana arrest.
Without a birth certificate, she is seeking to prove her son is a U.S. citizen with church baptismal records and a sworn statement from a witness to his birth.
A few problems
Texas has 195 licensed midwives, and while not as active as in past years, they deliver more than 1,300 children each year. They are distinct from certified nurse midwives, who are registered nurses who have obtained additional obstetrics training.
Lionel Perez, an Edinburg attorney, said he is contacted two or three times a week by Valley residents turned down for passports.
“It’s going to create quite a few problems,” said Perez, noting many residents don’t have the money to mount an expensive court challenge. “Basically, a lot of people are not going to be able to travel.”
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