Some doctors and midwives were accused of or admitted to arranging for birth certificates indicating birth within the US for some babies born in Mexico. But that casts suspicion on the birth locations of others who were legitimately born in the US with the assistance of the same doctors and midwives. Now that it is decades later, some are being denied passports, and there may not be a way of proving birth location otherwise. (Presumably, this is most troublesome to those who do not have a parent who, at the time, was a US citizen who could pass US citizenship by descent.)
That article is chilling. Here’s more from it:
This man had a birth certificate from Texas and a US Passport, but it didn’t matter. Can you imagine trying to find your parents’ rental agreement from 40 years ago?
It is quite common for vital records to have some errors. I spent months correcting some of them on my father’s death certificate. Some, I could not fix and the state of Virginia didn’t seem to care and didn’t seem to want me to try. I’m also trying to track down vital records that have “creative” spellings for the first and last names of my grandparents and great-grandparents.
Imagine someone revoking my citizenship on the basis of that? If the eye of Sauron here was pointed at people of Italian or Irish descent, it could happen. I suppose it could happen anyway, for any reason at all. Just chilling.
I dont know Texas rules but I think I had to review and sign the birth certificate. So if there was fraud the mother would have known. If my childs certificate said something different from where they were actually born, I would know.
Re: #2
Yes, the mother should know whether or not there was this kind of fraud.
However, in the non fraud case, how would she or the kid prove that there was no fraud if the State Department did not trust the birth certificate because the doctor or midwife was implicated in fraud in other births?
As I understand the case, ALL births from the doctors and midwives are being called into question, even though the doctors and midwives delivered a lot of babies in the US. A person should not be thrown out of the US because their mother used a midwife who falsified documents for other mothers and their children, yet that is exactly what is happening.
Moreover, the article says that people who sue usually win. An American should not have to sue the government to prove she’s an American.
I googled more articles on this. This was done in prior administrations as well. One man wrote that he used his mother’s prenatal records as proof.
^TatinG do you have links for those articles? Thanks.
I wonder what would happen if one did not have such records.
Wow, I’m not even sure if my OB kept my prenatal records of my kids—I switched to a new OB/GYB about 18 years ago. I guess it’s a good thing I happen to know where I lived in 1990, but getting proof I lived there would take some doing.
It’s not reasonable to expect folks to retain such records or be able to produce them after all this time. Wow!
It was done previously, but people won challenges and then there was no pushback. I don’t think anyone was jailed or deported on suspicion.
I especially am appalled by the guilty until proven innocent approach. “Your midwife or doctor may have faked some birth certificates, so even though we don’t have proof yours was one of them, you have to prove it wasn’t.”
According to the Post article, this appalling practice of denying passports to people who have American birth certificates is “surging” under this administration, with people being denied re-entry to the US, and other people being put into deportation proceedings. So far I haven’t seen any evidence being put forward that the people were actually born in Mexico, except a birth certificate from a person who supervised hundreds or thousands of American births and also fraudulently certified a few births. That is not adequate evidence of fraud!
I don’t care whether this was done occasionally in previous administrations. If it was, it was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
The cognitive dissonance between “de-clutter and get rid of all those old papers you have stashed for decades” and “you’d better hope you kept copies of your rental agreement from thirty years ago because you might need it to prove your adult child’s citizenship” is astounding.
Who knows what we need to keep anymore?
My own three kids were born in (military) hospitals that no longer exist. One former hospital is now a clinic and one is completely gone. Couldn’t even come close to guessing the names of the physicians who delivered two of them. One was a civilian contract physician who happened to be on call, and one was teaching family practice residents, so there was a crowd down at that end of the room, and we had no relationship with any of them.
All of this was before the days of electronic records.
During those pregnancy/childbirth years we lived in six different states. In rental properties.
I should probably go thank my husband for making and keeping hard copies of all of those hospital and pediatric care records years ago.
When DS applied for his passport and sent in all his documents, the Regional office lost his original birth certificate. It took us months to get them to admit it, but some guy finally just said it’s lost, and you’ll never get it back. The certified copy from his state of birth looks so cheap it’s ridiculous. My mother had to get hers after we discovered her mom had lost it decades ago – she was born in a major east coast city and her hospital records were destroyed in a hurricane. Took almost 2 years to get a new one.
When someone is mystified by the phrase white privelage, or puts up one of those ignorant “I have no privelages” memes, ask them if they expect to need proof of citizenship anytime soon.
One of my grandmothers didn’t have a birth certificate. She only had a baptismal certificate and her mother’s maiden name was badly misspelled on it. One of my grandfathers had his surname misspelled on his birth certificate. His mother’s first name was spelled with a ph instead of an f. Any of these could have had me disqualified if I had been Hispanic and born near the border! They were the children of immigrants too.
During the Great Depression, the US sent some people “back” to Mexico and it is estimated that 60% of them were US citizens:
I wonder how much longer it will be until the same happens to foreign-born naturalized citizens.
Already happening.
In most countries, citizenship derives from parentage and does not automatically confer to anyone born within their borders.
My mom was born in Spain (not on a military base but to a US-immigrant military father and a non-US mother) with dual American-Spanish citizenship. Just the other day, we were talking about how they lost her American birth certificate a long time ago so all she has is her Spanish one (which doesn’t indicate her citizenship status). She keeps her passport current to avoid issues but if she let it lapse…
I’m not worried about my white-European mother getting hassled - and @greenbutton is right that that is because of our white privilege. But this is really the first time ever that my mom has started collecting documents about her dad’s citizenship status just in case.
Per Snopes. Those who committed fraud on their applications will be denaturalized. I have no problem with that. That’s how we denaturalize those who lied about working in the Nazi death camps.
Well over a decade ago I had trouble getting a new passport as my previous one had expired. My only birth record was an old copy of the record from a military hospital overseas showing that my parents were US citizens born in the US. It was refused because it wasn’t an “original.” The storage facility in the mid-west where many records had been kept burned down long ago. I was told to ask my parents to provide proof, but both suffered from dementia. My dad, an ex-POW, was slowly dying. My military veteran godfather had died, as had his wife, and I knew of no one who could vouch for my birth information. The bureaucrats had no empathy or concern.
After months of effort, I finally cobbled together enough information to obtain a reissued “original” stamped/sealed birth certificate. It helped that I knew my dad’s SSN and enough other information to obtain records that proved my passage to the states had been provided by the military, among other “proofs” that I supplied. I do not look forward to the process of obtaining the new star ID dr. license here.