Mexican Americans on border denied passports

Texas native David Hernandez, a decorated Army veteran, can no longer see the world after his country denied him a passport.

Hernandez and other residents living in and around the U.S.-Mexico border are plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging that in denying them passports, the U.S. State Department is engaging in racial discrimination.

“This all started when I sent them [the U.S. State Department] my passport and they sent me a letter saying that it wasn’t sufficient,” Hernandez said. “So, I sent them all kinds of documents -- a baptismal certificate, military records, pictures of me in pre-kindergarten, a copy of my grandmother’s birth certificate that showed that she was an American citizen, and that still wasn’t enough. I knew something was wrong when they even started asking me for things like census documents from the 1930s that don’t even exist.”

Hernandez and the other plaintiffs say that the U.S. government is denying them passports because they are persons of Mexican and Latino descent whose births were assisted by parteras, or midwives. “The law says that if you’re born in this country, have parents who are or who get naturalized, you are a citizen,” said Hernandez, his voice cracking with anger and frustration. “We were all born here. We’re all citizens. The only difference is that we’re Hispanic, we grew up poor and we happened not to be born in a hospital. My mother had to pay a partera $40 instead.”

Lawyers for Hernandez and the other plaintiffs say they have documented a systematic pattern of racial discrimination among hundreds, perhaps thousands of people of Mexican descent who applied for passports and were subjected to unreasonable and arbitrary demands for often impossible-to-find documents proving they are citizens of the United States.

Robin Goldfaden, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is co-counsel in the case along with other law firms, said the passport denials represent “a spirit of disregard for birthright citizenship and a reckless disregard for the actual citizenship of an entire class of people.”

Goldfaden pointed out that although midwifery is a long-held tradition in parts of the United States where hospital-assisted birth is unaffordable or unavailable, the denial of passports is only taking place among people of Mexican descent living along the southern border.

Fr. Mike Seifert, pastor of the San Felipe de Jesus Catholic Church in Brownsville, Texas, became aware of the passport denial issue in his church. “After a couple of the members of my congregation came to me concerned and even crying because they were denied passports and would no longer be able to see their families in Mexico, I decided to ask the congregation if there were others facing similar situations,” Seifert said. “And 60 people came up and said they had the same passport problem.”

He called the situation “disgraceful.”

“Many members of our congregation won’t be able to do what they’ve done for decades: cross the border to see their families; many won’t be able to sustain themselves by doing business as they’ve always done in Mexico,” he said. “There’s no hospital around here and when you drive many miles to get health care, it’s very expensive. So people will also be denied basic health care because they will no longer be able to go just across the border to get cheap medicine or see a doctor in Matamorros for $15.”

National Catholic Reporter October 17, 2008