10/9/2018 Opinion | My Children Were Denied Passports Because They Were Delivered by a Midwife - The New York Times

Opinion

My Children Were
Denied Passports
Because They Were
Delivered by a
Midwife
In border states, the latest erosion of American citizens’ rights.

By Debbie Weingarten
Ms. Weingarten is a fellow for the Center for Community Change and TalkPoverty.

640
Sept. 3, 2018

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A young immigrant, Gabrielle, with her 2-month-old daughter, Naomi, at her home in Texas.
When Gabrielle became pregnant, she requested a home birth because she was scared of
entering the hospital and possibly being deported. Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

TUCSON — In February of 2012, I stood pregnant outside our Arizona

farmhouse, staring at a wide desert sky pinpricked with stars. The
baby had dropped and my belly was as hard as a stone. Near midnight,
I labored inside the house in an inflatable kiddie pool with crayon-
colored fish stamped on the sides. While I pushed and screamed my
head off, their cartoon faces smiled back at me, and then my son slid
out into the arms of my midwife. Two years later, the same midwife
caught my second son, who surprised us all when he made his way out
onto the floor of the bathroom.

My sons have never been outside the United States, but their passport
applications were denied by the State Department, pending more
evidence of their citizenship, just hours after news broke that the
Trump administration is denying thousands of passport

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10/9/2018 Opinion | My Children Were Denied Passports Because They Were Delivered by a Midwife - The New York Times

applications submitted by midwife-delivered American applicants

from border states.

At the heart of the denials are allegations that home-birth attendants

in border states provided fraudulent United States birth certificates to
babies who were actually born in Mexico. The Bush and Obama
administrations routinely denied passports to babies delivered by
midwives in Texas for similar reasons, resulting in a 2009 class action
lawsuit litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union. It argued that
the government “was violating the due process and equal protection
rights of virtually all midwife-delivered U.S. citizens living in the
southern border region.” The government settled, agreeing to develop
new protocols that would no longer discriminate against those from
border states who were born at home. But The Washington Post now
reports a spike in such passport denials to Hispanics under the Trump
administration.

The letters from the Department of State are addressed to my

children, who have the Hispanic last name of their father. They are
age 4 and 6 and not yet able to read. They say that “the evidence of
U.S. citizenship or nationality you submitted is not acceptable for
passport purposes,” and that “the document you submitted does not
sufficiently support your date and place of birth in the United States
since your birth was in a non-institutional setting.”

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In the case of both of my children, the “document” that does not

sufficiently support their citizenship is an original, official birth
certificate with the seal. Yet the State Department is now requesting a
slew of other evidence, including religious and health records created
in the first year of birth, early school records, birth certificates from
any older siblings and parents’ tax, rent or employment records from
the time of the birth.

To live in the borderlands is to live on a seam, in a space where two

things connect. In this place, we often witness the moments when
obscure high-level policies collide with the lives of actual human
beings. Here, noncitizens have been abused and exploited in horrific
ways — families seeking asylum have been separated from one
another, and migrants have been intentionally funneled into the most
dangerous and remote parts of the desert, sometimes to their deaths.

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10/9/2018 Opinion | My Children Were Denied Passports Because They Were Delivered by a Midwife - The New York Times
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The denial of passports to those delivered by midwives in border

states is the latest erosion of American citizens’ rights in the
misguided obsession to militarize and seal the United States-Mexico
border. Rural residents must stop at border security checkpoints just
to go to school or the grocery store. Tribal members are surveilled
while participating in ceremonies and harassed while harvesting
traditional foods.

There are countless reasons I chose to give birth at home with a

midwife. I was not a high-risk prenatal patient. I wanted autonomy —
to walk around while in labor, not to be bothered by or restricted by
machines or tubes, to eat something other than ice chips if I felt like it.
We also lived in a rural area 90 minutes from the nearest hospital with
a labor and delivery center, a distance that I imagined would be pure
hell to travel while in labor. And I wanted to be able to crawl into my
own bed at the end of it all, baby in my arms, and go — sort of — to
sleep.

My burden is not nearly that of others. I have access to a computer,

the internet and a printer for collating six years of tax records, W-9s
and rental agreements. I have a flexible job as a freelancer and
unlimited cellphone minutes to sit on hold with government agencies.
If I have to, I will pay an attorney to make sure my children get their
passports.

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In the moments after my first son was born, someone snapped a

picture. In it, he is the purple of just-borns and covered in vernix, his
mouth turned down in a pout that I recognize today — and I look
flushed and shellshocked by the ordeal, staring down at him in awe. In
a sense, it is as much evidence of his existence as any baptismal
document or tax record. I might as well submit the gnarly birth
photos, the placenta forgotten in my freezer and a map of the stars as
they appeared from the Arizona desert on the nights my children were
born.

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