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His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

This is unprecedented. This is unAmerican in the extreme. This is the kind of thing out of which blood-and-soil laws are drawn. (Dr. Wilhelm Stuckert, please call your office in hell.) Your papers are never in order, if you happen to fit a broadly drawn racial profile. This is fascism, pure and simple.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies.

Apparently, there was some hocus-pocus done in the past regarding midwives and doctors providing babies born in Mexico with U.S. birth certificates. (This had completely escaped my attention.) The last two previous administrations wrestled with the problem and there finally was a settlement on the question with the ACLU in 2009. However, somebody whispered about the situation to some authoritarian yahoo in the administration and an old bureaucratic tangle became today's xenophobic thuggery.

In a case last August, a 35-year-old Texas man with a U.S. passport was interrogated while crossing back into Texas from Mexico with his son at the McAllen-Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge, connecting Reynosa, Mexico, to McAllen, Tex. His passport was taken from him, and Customs and Border Protection agents told him to admit that he was born in Mexico, according to documents later filed in federal court. He refused and was sent to the Los Fresnos Detention Center and entered into deportation proceedings.

Somebody, please, rein this lunatic in while there's still enough of this country's ideals worth defending.

Now, the administration appears to be taking aim at a broad group of Americans along the stretch of the border where Trump has promised to build his wall, where he directed the deployment of National Guardsmen, and where the majority of cases in which children were separated from their parents during the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy occurred. The State Department would not say how many passports it has denied to people along the border because of concerns about fraudulent birth certificates. The government has also refused to provide a list of midwives whom it considers to be suspicious.

Passports can be serious weapons in the hands of your average tinhorn tyranny. Back in the days of the Pinochet regime in Chile, over 20,000 Chilean exiles had their passports marked with an "L," a designation that kept them out of the country. More to our purposes, in 1938, the German government invalidated all German passports belonging to Jewish citizens. By the fall, they were all issued new passports marked with a "J." It was one of the first ways that German Jews were culled from the rest of the population and targeted. At about the same time, in the Soviet Union, passports were made mandatory as a means of internal control, as a means of keeping track of various elements of which the regime was not fond.

By common agreement, your passport tells the rest of the world who you are. I'm not sure I want the rest of the world to know that right now.

subgenius wrote:"legally naturalized" is a term not applicable if applicant submitted fraudulent information.

The new report found that hundreds, if not thousands, of people living on the border have been denied passports by the State Department over skepticism about their birth certificates. It's true, the report says, that some midwives in the area have created falsified birth records in the past, but many of these same people created legitimate birth records as well.
When it can't confirm that the document is legitimate, it seems, the department errs on the side of denying the passport. In one case the Postdocumented, a man provided additional evidence of his birthplace after being initially denied, only to be denied once again. He had to hire a lawyer to continue to appeal the decision — a move that can very costly for people with low incomes. [url]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/msn/Trump’s-administration-is-now-questioning-citizens’-birth-certificates/ar-BBMD5vx[/url]

Ethnic Cleansing
War Crime
Ethnic cleansing, the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups.

Per The Washington Post, here’s what we’re dealing with on our southern border:
His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.
But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

This is what “taking our country back” looks like from a policy perspective. Yes, Bush and Obama enforced this policy too, but the report makes it clear that it was nowhere near the scale of what Trump is doing. Trump represents a large chunk of Americans who believe that the only true way to be an American is to be “white.” When they talk about immigrants taking over our culture, they don’t mean British immigrants, but anyone whose skin is too dark to be anointed “white.” That is ethnic cleansing. A certain type of person is deemed insufficiently American, and this twisted logic dictates that in order to preserve our American identity, America must cleanse itself of these supposed undesirables. We associate the term with mass murder, but it does not have to go that far to qualify as ethnic cleansing (but the lesson we should take from history is that this is the direction these kinds of policies inevitably take if left in place long enough).

What these Trump supporters fail to understand is that “whiteness” is an ever-shifting construct. Whiteness exists solely to reinforce class barriers along sometimes amorphous racial lines—not to technically define ethnic groups. Swedish “white people” do not share the exact same culture as Italian “whites.” Whiteness has no specific cultural definition outside of denigrating the ethnic groups it ostracizes. This cartoon from an 1899 Harper’s Weekly that I highlighted in my piece in 2016 about the amorphousness of whiteness demonstrates what the enforcement of whiteness is really all about.

What these Trump supporters fail to understand is that “whiteness” is an ever-shifting construct. Whiteness exists solely to reinforce class barriers along sometimes amorphous racial lines—not to technically define ethnic groups. Swedish “white people” do not share the exact same culture as Italian “whites.” Whiteness has no specific cultural definition outside of denigrating the ethnic groups it ostracizes. This cartoon from an 1899 Harper’s Weekly that I highlighted in my piece in 2016 about the amorphousness of whiteness demonstrates what the enforcement of whiteness is really all about.

The victims themselves who were issued these birth certificates as babies are not at fault if they happen to be among the few whose birth certificates issued in their name were forged.

ajax18 wrote:
If my parents rob a bank and I inherit several million dollars should I still have to give the money back when they're brought to justice? I got that money through no fault of my own. How can you punish me for that?

What about the children of people patiently waiting their turn to immigrate to the US? What crime did they commit that caused them to have to wait longer for their opportunity because someone was able to cut in line in front of them?

Crying wolf with false charges of racism and xenophobia in this case is the reason people don't take real racism seriously or reflexively dismiss the claims when it is actually there.