ACLU sues government over denied passports
Feds suspicious of midwife deliveries near border
WASHINGTON – The State Department is denying passports to people born in southern Texas near the border with Mexico if they were delivered by midwives, citing a history of birth certificate forgeries there for Mexican-born children dating to the 1960s, according to U.S. officials.
In a lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union alleges that the government is systematically discriminating against U.S.-born citizens on the basis of ethnicity and national origin. Attorneys for the plaintiff assert that such arbitrary bans disproportionately affect rural and poor people who have less access to doctors.
Federal authorities “have adopted and applied blanket suspicion toward one group of passport applicants … effectively denying the passports of many for the apparent sins of a few,” the ACLU states in a complaint to be filed this week in U.S. District Court in McAllen, Texas.
The civil liberties group is seeking class-action status on behalf of tens of thousands of Mexican-Americans of all ages delivered by midwives in border states, alleging violations of constitutional due process and equal protection guarantees.
Steve Royster, spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, and Bill Wright, spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a successor agency to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, declined to comment, citing the litigation.
It is not clear when U.S. officials began viewing midwife certificates with suspicion. State Department spokesman Cy Ferenchak confirmed the policy to the Brownsville Herald in Texas earlier this summer, saying, “Normally, a birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship. … But because of a history of fraudulently filed reports on the Southwest border, we don’t have much faith in the document.”
The federal government won convictions against dozens of South Texas midwives from 1967 through 1997 for fraudulently registering births that they did not deliver, a U.S. official said, with most convictions coming after 1980.
An INS list last updated in October 2002 identifies at least 65 midwives who have been convicted of fraud since the 1960s. U.S. officials previously said cases in the 1990s uncovered forgeries for about 15,000 people born in Mexico. By comparison, about 21,000 Texas births were certified in 2004 by midwives, an integral, though shrinking, part of South Texas culture.