Posted on 07/16/2015 7:12:40 PM PDT by nickcarraway
State officials have refused to give an untold number of Texas-born children birth certificates due to their parents’ immigration status, according to a lawsuit that was filed earlier this year.
More than a dozen undocumented women have sued the Department of State Health Services, saying workers at vital statistics offices in the Rio Grande Valley refused to give them birth certificates because of insufficient records proving their identity. Many of the women had used the same documents – a so-called matricula issued by their consulate or a foreign passport without a current U.S. visa – to obtain birth certificates for other children born in Texas as recently as 2012.
The lawsuit, which was reported by the Texas Observer earlier this week, claims these children are being discriminated against because of a parent’s tenuous immigration status. Without official proof of the parent-child relationship, the children have been unable to enroll in school, have had difficulty obtaining medical care and other benefits they should be eligible to receive as U.S. citizens.
By denying them birth certificates, the lawsuit alleges, the state has created a “category of second-class citizens.”
Under the state’s current policy, immigrants can use national ID cards from their home countries or some electoral ID cards to obtain a birth certificate. But many of these women fled violence in Mexico or Central America when they were minors and never got electoral IDs. As for other documentation, many are forcibly stripped of their national IDs as they make the perilous journey north.
When Katherine Johana Portillo fled violence in Guatemala with her three-year-old son, she was carrying a national ID state officials would have accepted. But coyotes smuggling her through northern Mexico demanded immigrants throw their ID cards into a field because the local cartels charged much higher crossing fees for Central Americans. “Pregnant and fearing for her safety if she disobeyed,” she tossed her ID, the lawsuit states.
She hasn’t been able to get a birth certificate for the child she delivered in a McAllen hospital last November.
It’s unclear exactly when the state started rejecting documents that were once accepted. DSHS spokesman Chris Van Deusen told the Press the state has rejected matriculas and foreign passports without a current visa since at least 2008, perhaps even longer. “We don’t consider it a valid ID,” he said of consulate documents. “Our concern is that it’s not secure, that it’s not valid, and that it wouldn’t stand on its own to get an ID.”
As for foreign passports without visas: “We don’t know what every passport in the world looks like, so we have no way to authenticate that.”
However the lawsuit, filed by Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, claims this is a more recent change that has created a serious, growing problem in the immigrant community. It appears state officials started rejecting these documents a few years ago, but the policy was only sporadically enforced until 2013 or 2014. According to the lawsuit, state vital statistics offices have turned away women who used the exact same documents to obtain birth certificates for their older Texas-born children.
One mother, who delivered a daughter at a McAllen hospital this past March, asked workers at the local vital statistics office why birth certificates had become so difficult to obtain. The worker “responded that since 2014-2015 the requirements had become stricter to prevent undocumented persons from obtaining status through their U.S. citizen children,” the lawsuit alleges. When another undocumented woman tried to get a birth certificate for her son, the state worker “threatened to report her to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
The women’s lawyers say state officials are well aware of the growing problem, but have “failed and refused to correct the situation.” When we asked Van Deusen with DSHS why women have been denied birth certificates using the exact same documents the state has accepted in recent years, he said, “without knowing more about their specific cases, that’s not something I can address really.”
If it’s truly a matter of authenticating foreign documents, has the state tried to work with foreign consulates to determine the validity of matriculas or foreign passports? “I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t have an answer for you on that,” Van Deusen told us.
Lawyers for the women say the new regulations and policy changes leave “a very large percentage of the undocumented community” without a way to obtain a birth certificate for their U.S. citizen children. “As a result of this situation, hundreds, and possibly thousands, of parents from Mexico and Central America have recently been denied birth certificates for their Texas-born children.”
Pretty hard to ANCHOR in sand./s
Small price to pay for true freedom in my book.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
No, this does not make them second class citizens. First....these were NEVER, EVER, citizens. and second class, ValJar’s puppet made them second class not Texas.
Thank you Texas lawmakers. Nice to see some using ‘common’ sense these days. There seems to be little of it to go around.
I hear Austin is really liberal as well as Huston. I’d stay away from those areas.
Considering what happened in Waco in May; I would definitely stay away from there too.
Who knew that it was illegal to inconvenience illegals????
LOL.
GO TEXAS!
Don't count in it.
Thank- you Greg Abbot!!!
Don’t mess with Texas when there’s a real Govenor in town!
Following Donald Trump’s example........people will find their courage to do the right thing when they have strong leaders
Not all of it......there’s the beautiful Hill Country of Texas
“If TX secedes I may have to move there but it is awful hot and flat.”
Please see my ‘profile’ page to learn about the amazing ecological diversity of Texas.
If it’s truly a matter of authenticating foreign documents, has the state tried to work with foreign consulates to determine the validity of matriculas or foreign passports?????
Who in the Hell cares, It is NOT THE STATE’S JOB, that is your JOB as an INDIVIDUAL to have your documentation validated by the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, Obama said it is the FEDS that control immigration, go see them!.
So am I.
OK. Well the babies are citizens.
Did the midwife file with the county a record of the birth?
Then there would be something on file and your brothers girlfriend could get a certified copy .
Is that the point where they told her she needed an affidavit, was it when she tried to get a certified copy of the birth cert?
Or was it at the passport office?
Reason I ask is because my mother in law was born at home and the birth cert was filed six months later.
When she got old, she let her licence expire due to illness and “I don’t drive anymore” and her activities were such that she didn’t need ID.
Driver license had Americanized version of her old country first name and her married last name. She did what a lot of people did back then, just used an Americanized version of her old country first name without doing a legal name change.
All her older siblings and parents were deceased and her last name had changed the one time due to marriage.
But no record of marriage with the county, because she got married in church; that doc had her old country first name and her maiden last name. Plus the first and last name of her husband.
She did have a baptism cert but it had old country first name and maiden last name.
So no paper trail of formal docs to show first and last name changes; baptism and church marriage docs aren’t accepted anymore .
I did some checking at the genealogy library and found a birth record extract showing her maiden last name and a variant of her old country first name and it was the year in which the baptism cert was issued and so it was probably the right one.
But she was born in new York, and the requirements to get the certified copy was such that in order to —get— the doc proving your birth here, you first had to prove you were born here.
And the person had to do it themselves, a famiy member couldn’t do it for them, due to the tightened rules after 9-11.
Classic catch 22 that would have required the aid of a lawyer to sort out.
That’s what that 19 year old Texas girl Alecia Faith Pennington did ....
her grandparents on both sides, her parents, her, and her eight siblings were all born in Texas.
All her siblings and her were born at home and the parents never got birth certs or soc sec numbers for them and they all were homeschooled.
So, as far as the “system” is concerned, the children don’t exist, and can’t prove their citizenship.
So when the young lady wanted to leave home and go to school, she tried to file for a birth cert and was denied.
She went to live with her grandparents, and with their help, got a lawyer and also went to her elected representative to alert them to the situation.
Additional info on Alecia Pennington and her siblings- the midwife never filed the birth record with the county.
There was one exception, her next younger sibling.
Alecia has three older siblings and five younger siblings and her parents weren’t being cooperative in regards to affidavits, but since the situation has gone out on social media and a lawyer is involved, they may change their position.
The older siblings either work in the parents company or do freelance work like photography or music, where there isn’t stringent ID requirements and one can work “off the books”.
But a huge obstacle is not being able to get a driver license and thus be able to even get to the work site if they didn’t want to work in the parents company.
And even if they freelance, how would they get there without a vehicle and a license?
So, in closing, if anyone who is here -legally- and not an anchor baby has a problem proving their citizenship, they should do what they can and try everything to get the docs, and if they hit a roadblock, get a lawyer who can guide them through the bureaucracy.
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