Trump's stripping of passports from some Texas Latinos, explained

[Gothmog]

This is a horrible act of racism by trump https://www.vox.com/2018/8/30/17800410/trump-passport-birth-certificate-hispanic-denial-citizens

Most Americans assume there’s a clear-cut line between legal immigrants and unauthorized immigrants; between noncitizens and citizens; between immigrants who have been naturalized and citizens who were born here.

The Trump administration often sparks outrage for doing things that appear to cross those lines: arresting unauthorized immigrants at their green-card interviews; starting an effort to comb old naturalization applications for fraud, in an effort labeled a “denaturalization task force” by the press; and, now, questioning the citizenship of people who have lived for decades as native-born US citizens.

But in all of these cases, the administration isn’t crossing an unprecedented bright line. It’s exploiting places where the boundaries between categories are murkier — often by building on what past administrations had already done. (It wasn’t the Trump administration that collected a list of “suspicious” midwives, for example.)

Generally, these boundary areas are where immigration officials show the most caution. They have discretion in who they pursue and who they don’t — at the margins, they’re most likely to use their discretion to show sympathy to people who’ve been living in the US and have roots here, even if they could be more aggressive in trying to push them out.

It’s possible that the government has changed its policy across the board on birth certificates issued by midwives or other “suspicious” practitioners — or even for people born in the US to non-US citizens more broadly — though there’s no evidence for that

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[Ms. Toad]

1. Remember this, when people insist in connection with voting

that proving your citizenship is so easy - everyone can do it.

This is precisely the kind of stories many of us have been raising for years regarding the challenges of documenting birth when the birth occured at home, to a non-white woman, attended by a midwife.

Many such births are made more complex by not being registered immediately (some innocuously, and some becuase registration of birth was refused to certain populations).

We have always had a racist system - Trump is just better than most at exploiting it.

[moriah]

2. I honestly think the Texas physician was most likely innocent of fraud.

The accusation came from an unnamed Mexican doctor who claimed there was a forgery.

And if a US-born child attempts to go to school in Mexico (say one parent was ordered to leave or visa expired, so the family goes to Mexico to stay together), just having the regular US stamped birth certificate is not enough for them. They need it "Apostilled" -- a process under the Hague Convention to say a document is authentic, which families leaving in a hurry wouldn't know to do for their child's BC whie still in the States.

Some articles indicate it took over a year to get USC children enrolled in school in Mexico through the proper channels.

So the easiest thing to do is get a Mexican doctor to issue a fake Mexican birth certificate. Which several of the people holding US birth certificates showing their child was born in a birthing center did for their kids thinking it was the only way to get them enrolled. It's FAR easier to get fake Mexican documents than US ones.

So what do you think is more likely? A Mexican doctor caught out issuing fake certificates placing the blame on a dead doctor who delivered 15,000 babies in 55 years of practice, or even a significant percentage of those 15,000 people (generations -- just like the doc who saw my mom when she was pregnant with me was my first gynecologist, he delivered babies, then delivered those children's babies when they were grown) not really being citizens?

[Gothmog]

3. We must call this what it is: An attempt by the Trump administration at ethnic cleansing

From the Houston paper

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