Suspicious Americans stopped giving US passports

According to immigration lawyers, cases of refusals to issue US passports to people who have an American birth certificate but were born in border regions have become more frequent in the United States, writes The Washington Post.

Фото: Depositphotos

Many of these people lived all their lives in America, voted in elections and served in the army, but now their citizenship is in question. Some of them even ended up in prisons and faced the threat of deportation.

Immigration authorities claim that these people are denied passports due to suspected fraud of birth documents. In 1990, a series of court cases took place, during which midwives who worked near the border were accused of faking American birth certificates for children born in Mexico.

The State Department under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations denied U.S. passports to people who were born at home rather than in hospitals assisted by midwives in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The use of midwives is a long tradition in the region, partly due to the high cost of hospital care.

The same midwives who provided fraudulent birth certificates in the 1990s also delivered thousands of children born legally in the United States. It was almost impossible to distinguish between legal and illegal documents - all of which were officially issued by the State of Texas decades ago.

In 2009, the ACLU (American Community for the Protection of Public Freedoms) won a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of Americans who were denied passports. After that, the number of such cases decreased, and those who were previously denied a passport, often successfully appealed against this decision to the courts. That was before the end of the Obama presidency.

But the arrival at the White House of Donald Trump led to a sharp increase in the number of such failures.

The State Department explained that those who have a birth certificate issued by a midwife suspected of committing fraud, as well as applicants who have a birth certificate in the United States and in another country, are asked to provide additional documentation confirming that they are born in the USA.

“Individuals who cannot demonstrate that they were born in the United States are denied a passport,” the State Department noted.

But what do you need to prove exactly where you were born? According to an American veteran with Mexican roots who was denied a passport, for some who were born near the border, it is almost impossible.

When a former soldier named Juan received a letter from the State Department saying that the agency had doubts about his American citizenship, he asked for a number of documents that few people keep: evidence of the provision of antenatal care for his mother in the United States; baptismal certificate of Juan; rental contracts in the United States for the period when he was a child.

He managed to find some of these documents, but a few weeks later he received another letter in which the US government stated that the information provided “did not confirm that you were born in the United States”.

Now Juan, who earns 13 dollars an hour as a prison guard, is looking for a lawyer whose services will cost him thousands of dollars.

Some of these people were sent to immigration prisons for failing to prove birth in the United States.

Last August, an 35-year-old man from Texas with a US passport was questioned. Immigration agents demanded from him to admit that he was born in Mexico. He refused and was sent to the Los Fresnos Detention Center, and the deportation process was initiated against him.

He was released three days later, and a deportation hearing was scheduled for 2019. A man's passport, issued in 2008, was annulled.

There are already dozens of similar stories. There are soldiers and border guards among people who were refused extradition or annulled earlier issued passports. In some cases, immigration agents arrived at people's homes without prior notice and seized passports for further cancellation.

The US government refuses to provide a list of midwives or doctors they suspect of issuing fraudulent birth certificates. Some who were denied a passport had certificates issued by Jorge Treviño, a well-known Texas gynecologist who took delivery of 15 000 children.

Read also on ForumDaily:

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Thousands of Americans with tax debts may be left without passports: what you need to know

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