At least 11 migrant women have been dropped off in Mexican border towns since March last year without birth certificates for their day-old newborns of the U.S. citizen, an investigation by the Fuller Project and the Guardian found.
Based on multiple conversations with lawyers working with asylum seekers at the border and a review of hospital records and legal documents, several newborns of the U.S. citizen were removed to Mexico after their mothers were subject to a Trump-era border ban that the Biden-Harris’s government is slow to recall.
Lawyers suspect that the actual number of such cases may be higher because the vast majority of these rapid “evictions,” as the government calls them, took place away from the public eye and without the involvement of lawyers.
These advocates and advocates have said that the recent pattern of removing U.S. citizens without birth certificates has taken place in recent years in the area of immigration policies and practices.
Former President Donald Trump’s government’s zero tolerance policy, which resulted in more than 5,000 children being separated from parents, and the increase in long-term detention of children was the most visible policy, but was only the tip of the iceberg. iceberg. Domestic security agencies also detained 4,600 pregnant women between 2016 and 2018, with the number increasing by 52% between the two years. Several detained women have also complained of miscarriages and invasive medical procedures.
Hélène *, a 23-year-old woman from Haiti, was nine months pregnant when she moved to the United States in July 2020. She was under the supervision of the U.S. Border Patrol when her water broke. Agency officials transported her to a local hospital in Chula Vista, California, to give birth. She was happy when her daughter was born – that everything went smoothly, she said in a phone call by a translator to the Fuller Project and the Guardian.
Three days later, they were fired. Hélène recalls that she thought she would be released to family and allowed to continue her asylum case, she said. But 25 or so minutes later, she was back in Mexico, on the border where she arrived a few days ago, pregnant at the height of summer, after a journey that lasted one month and three days. Panicked, she began to cry. She pleaded in Spanish with the customs and border protection officers (CBP) who drove her across the border. She knew they understood, she says. The officers did not respond.
They dropped her off across the San Diego-Tijuana border on the side of the road. She had no idea what to do or where to go. She also did not have her newborn birth certificate. When it became evening, she and her baby were sleeping right there on the street, on the other side of safety.
Hélène was subject to Title 42, an order for the control and prevention of diseases issued during the beginning of the government’s federal action against the Covid-19 pandemic in March last year. The rule allowed CBP officials to summarily “expel” all migrants who entered the U.S. without permission instead of giving access to the legal way to seek protection, even those seeking asylum.
Rapid deportations have taken place at the border in the past, but immigrants usually had the right to be screened for asylum claims and to see an immigration judge if they were likely to suffer harm after removal. Title 42 allows authorities to summarily dismiss people. However, officials may release people on a case-by-case basis and grant access in the case of humanitarian or public interest.
“Immigration [agencies have] the authority to prevent this from happening, but they refuse to do so, ”said Luis M Gonzalez, a lawyer for the Jewish Family Services, who represented two cases in which migrating mothers and their newborns were expelled from the U.S. citizen. ‘They farm [the] lives of American citizens in danger. In this case newborns. ”
In fiscal year 2020, CBP reported that more than 200,000 evictions – including unaccompanied children – had been reversed under Title 42. In the first three months of the fiscal year 2021, emissions have so far exceeded 190,000. The Trump administration praised Title 42 as “extremely effective.”
On February 2, Joe Biden issued an executive order ordering his officials to “immediately review” Title 42, among other things, border policy. But lawyers have been frustrated that decisive, faster action has not yet been taken. On January 29, a three-judge panel of conservative judges appointed by Trump overturned a lower court ruling to block the rule from applying to unaccompanied minors.
In a statement on Tuesday, Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigration Rights Project, said it was “worrying” that Biden’s orders did not include immediate action to revoke and withdraw the illegal and inhumane policies inherited from this government. – and now owns ”.
A CBP spokeswoman, who asked for the information she provided to be attributed to the agency, said the agency did not keep track of how many women with U.S. citizens’ newborns were under Title 42 and did not want other questions about such cases are not answered. “According to policy, CBP does not comment on individual cases due to privacy reasons,” the spokesman, who asked not to be named, said in an email.
They added: “Hospitals are responsible for providing birth certificates and CBP does not prevent individuals, regardless of immigration status, from obtaining birth certificates for U.S. citizens.”
CBP also told a local reporter last year that at least one new Honduran mother was given the option to give her baby to U.S. child services before returning to Mexico.
“It’s not really a choice,” said Mitra Ebadolahi of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Diego, who, along with Gonzalez of the Jewish Family Services, lodged a complaint with the Inspector General’s Department of Homeland Security. the case of this Honduran mother.
The Honduran woman, her husband and their nine-year-old surrendered to border patrol agents last June when the woman was nine months pregnant. The family had already been referred back to Mexico once in March before Title 42 came into effect. During their time in Mexico, they were threatened by armed men and endured significant personal and material insecurity, according to the July 10 complaint.
The woman, who is experiencing acute pain as a result of her late pregnancy, was taken to the hospital in Chula Vista, California, while her partner and son were deported to Tijuana, Mexico. murders and grass wars. Two days later, the woman and her baby were also sent to Tijuana.
In another case, suggested by Gonzalez, a migrating woman undergoing a C-section is an invasive procedure that takes weeks to heal, yet within the week of her surgery with her newborn baby to Mexico remove. Gonzalez later successfully appealed to authorities to allow both families on humanitarian grounds.
“I know this is a cliché, but there is a very Kafka-like characteristic to these processes that really pervades the humanity of the migrants’ experiences,” Ebadolahi said. “I struggled to come up with a language that conveys the damage and damage done.”
Natalia * (24) wakes up in her apartment in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, across the border from McAllen, Texas, where she gave birth to her daughter in April last year. Throughout the day, she cares for the baby and her four-year-old son. If she can come to America in the future, it’s the first thing she wants to do to get her toddler’s birth certificate, which she did not have in early January when she last spoke to the Guardian.
There may be problems with mothers in her position: they may struggle to get their children vaccinated and register for early education, and they may have difficulty obtaining food aid and other government benefits, says Nicole Ramos, director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project, a legal services organization for migrants.
“For all intents and purposes, that child is stateless, which is going to create a whole host of barriers … because they cannot establish citizenship,” says Ramos, who says her organization has handled nine such cases, including Hélène’s and Natalia’s. .
For the past two years, camps along the U.S.-Mexico border have struggled to house families trapped by Trump’s border policies, who are struggling to access basic services such as food, clean water and medical assistance.
Human Rights First, an advocacy organization, has documented more than 1,300 cases of violent assault, kidnapping, rape and murder among migrants placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols – leaving migrants in Mexico waiting for their US court hearings, which have now been suspended during the pandemic.
During this time, border shelters in Mexico became tighter and hospitals more. Desperate, many migrants again tried to enter the United States, only to be returned under Title 42.
Lawyers say all of these policies target people who have already experienced severe trauma through repetitive cycles.
“It has become really clear that the right to child protection of children is about protecting white, Christian children … not about colored children born to immigrant mothers,” Ramos says.
On February 3, the Washington Post reported that Mexico had revealed that it would not publicly stop accepting US-displaced Central American families, but would accept single adults.
When Natalia’s daughter cuddled and scurried in January, she said she would like to know Americans: border officials told her before her eviction to Reynosa that her daughter would not be able to get a birth certificate because she was born among parents who were migrants without rights. Her daughter would also not have rights, they said.
* The names were changed at the request of immigration attorneys, as both women are fleeing persecution.
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This story is published in partnership between the guardian and the Fuller project. Tanvi Misra is a contributing reporter to the Fuller Project, a nonprofit news agency that reports on issues affecting women.