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Posted to sci.med,rec.autos.driving,rec.food.cooking,misc.consumers.frugal-living
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Midwife birth certificates tied to immigration problems alongTexas border
On Jun 6, 9:10*am, Metspitzer > wrote:
> (CNN) -- The women's lives have taken different paths since the days
> they were born.
>
> Brenda Vazquez is a 29-year-old elementary school teacher in
> Matamoros, Mexico. Laura Castro lives across the border in
> Brownsville, Texas. She is a 32-year-old housewife who helps her
> husband manage several stores.
>
> They share one thing in common: Both say they were delivered by
> midwives in south Texas, but pressured by U.S. Border Patrol agents to
> deny their U.S. citizenship.
>
> Their problems began, according to attorney Jaime Diez, when a group
> of midwives along the U.S.-Mexico border were found guilty of selling
> birth certificates to people who were not born in the United States.
>
> "Now all the midwives in the area are suspected of committing fraud,"
> said Diez, who said his office regularly sees cases of people
> delivered by midwives in Texas. Some of them are struggling to get
> passports because officials question the validity of their birth
> certificates, he said. Others have been deported and had their
> identification documents confiscated at the border, he said.
>
> Vazquez, who Diez is representing in a federal lawsuit filed last
> week, said she was intimidated into signing a document swearing she
> was not a U.S. citizen at a border crossing in Brownsville, Texas,
> last year.
>
> "He said, 'You'd better cooperate with me, because if you don't,
> you're going to jail. I had to lie and say that I was not a citizen.
> ... I was quite scared. I was crying," the second-grade teacher said.
>
> A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said he could not
> comment about Vazquez's case or other such cases "due to pending legal
> action."
>
> Border patrol agents are "obligated to ensure that documentation
> presented to establish citizenship is proper and correct and was
> issued to the person presenting the documents," spokesman Bill Brooks
> said in a statement.
>
> A 2012 report from the Texas Office of the Inspector General said a
> fraud investigation had been "substantiated" and Vazquez's birth
> record had been flagged, noting Vazquez's signed confession and the
> fact that officials found birth certificates for Vazquez in both the
> United States and Mexico. The report said the case would not be
> prosecuted because it was beyond the statute of limitations.
>
> Vazquez said her parents obtained the Mexican birth certificate so she
> could study in Mexico.
>
> Vazquez said she has never lived in the United States, but wants to
> fight to regain her citizenship.
>
> "With crime as it is in Mexico, something might happen, and as a
> citizen I would go live there," she said.
>
> Laura Castro said she faced a similar situation with her mother and
> sister at the same border crossing in 2009.
>
> "My sister got desperate and signed the paper," Castro said.
>
> A border patrol agent told her that her mother had admitted to buying
> false identification documents for the family.
>
> "He kept asking me the same thing, and I replied the same thing, that
> I was a citizen. ... I said I was not going to sign because I did
> nothing wrong, and they let me go. ... They sent me back to Mexico,"
> she said.
>
> Nearly a year later, authorities returned Castro her U.S. passport
> after she filed a lawsuit, she said.
>
> But Castro said she remains frustrated.
>
> "We were very humiliated. We were treated like criminals," she said.
>
> The issue has come up before. In 2008, the ACLU sued the federal
> government on behalf of nine people, arguing that authorities were
> unfairly discriminating against passport applicants.
>
> "For countless Latinos who were delivered by midwives in the Southwest
> ... trying to obtain a passport has become an exercise in futility,"
> the ACLU said in a statement at the time. "Although midwifery has been
> a common practice for more than a century, particularly in rural and
> other traditionally underserved communities, the U.S. government has
> imposed unsurpassable hurdles on midwife-delivered Latinos to prove
> their citizenship and eligibility for U.S. passports -- even when
> their citizenship has already been established in the past."
>
> In a 2009 settlement, the State Department agreed to a new set of
> procedures for such passport applications.
>
> But the settlement said the department denied the ACLU's accusations,
> and noted that "there has been significant fraud by midwives and other
> birth attendants certifying births as occurring in the United States
> when they have not occurred in the United States."
>
> Diez said U.S. authorities need to do more to address the problem.
>
> "If they doubt that a person was born here and they can't criminally
> charge them, then give them a process in which they can send their
> documents to be investigated, give them a chance to be before a judge
> with a lawyer, and in which there could be a process in which they
> make things right. That's how it should be when we are talking about
> the citizenship of someone," he said.
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/05/us/tex...ives/index.htm...
Dirty, filthy, beaner scum.
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