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At least 11 migrant women were dropped off in Mexican border towns without birth certificates for their days-old US citizen newborns since March of last year, an investigation by the Fuller Project and the Guardian has found.
Advocates suspect the actual number of such cases could be higher because the vast majority of these fast-track “expulsions”, as the administration calls them, have occurred away from the public eye and without the involvement of lawyers.
This recent pattern of removal of US citizens without birth certificates has occurred against the backdrop of immigration policies and practices in recent years that have harmed already vulnerable women and children, advocates and lawyers say.
Hélène*, a 23-year-old woman from Haiti, was nine months pregnant when she crossed into the United States in July 2020. She was in the custody of the US 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 baby girl was born – that everything went smoothly, she told the Fuller Project and the Guardian in a phone conversation through a translator.
Three days later, they were discharged. Hélène remembers thinking that she would be released to family and allowed to pursue her asylum case, she said. But 25 or so minutes later, she was back in Mexico, at the very border she arrived at a few days ago, pregnant at the height of summer, after a journey that lasted one month and three days. Panicking, she began to cry. She pleaded in Spanish to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who had driven her across the border. She knew they understood, she says. The officers did not respond.
They dropped her off across from the San Diego-Tijuana border, on the side of the road. She had no idea what to do or where to go.
She also didn’t have her newborn’s birth certificate. When night fell, she and her baby slept right there on the street, on the other side of safety.
Hélène was subject to Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order issued during the beginning of the government’s federal actions against the Covid-19 pandemic last March. The rule allowed CBP officials to summarily “expel” all migrants who entered the US without authorization, instead of letting them access the legal avenue to request protection, even those seeking asylum.
Fast deportations have happened before at the border but typically immigrants have had the right to be screened for asylum claims and to see an immigration judge if they are likely to face harm upon removal. Title 42 allows authorities to turn away people summarily.
However, officials can exempt people on a case-by-case basis and grant entry in case of humanitarian or public interest considerations.
“Immigration [agencies have] the authority to be able to prevent that from happening but they’re refusing to do that,” said Luis M Gonzalez, a lawyer with the Jewish Family Services, who has represented two cases in which migrant mothers and their US citizen newborns were expelled. “They are placing [the] lives of US citizens in danger. In this case, newborns.”
In a statement Tuesday, Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, called it “troubling” that Biden’s orders “did not include immediate action to rescind and unwind more of the unlawful and inhumane policies that this administration inherited – and now owns”.
CBP also told a local reporter last year that at least one new mother from Honduras was given the option to give her baby up to US child services before returning to Mexico.
