On the Texas border some local officials are engaged in activities that go beyond talk, enforcing some of the toughest rules in the country limiting the types of ID parents can show to receive copies of birth certificates. The result has been a refusal to issue birth certificates to many of the Texas-born children of immigrants here illegally.
Texas has not directly challenged the citizenship of the children, which is granted by the 14th Amendment to anyone born in the United States. Many of them have birth certificates in the state’s database. It is just a matter of adequate identification, the state says.
Organizations that work on behalf of immigrants suspect that nativist sentiments are being turned into nativist policies, with the goal of making it harder for people in the country illegally to live and raise families in Texas.
Without a birth certificate, illegal immigrants say they cannot have newborns baptized, have had difficulty enrolling their children in day care and school and have lost or fear losing Medicaid coverage and other government services and benefits for their families. They said officials required birth certificates for these programs, as proof of parenthood or the child’s Texas birth.
Some have older children who have birth certificates but younger children who do not, because local registrars who used to accept certain types of identification issued abroad no longer do.
In court papers, lawyers for Texas disputed some of the claims made by those denied birth certificates, arguing that not having a copy of a birth certificate does not prevent a child from attending school or qualifying for Medicaid. And they say state policies do not discriminate against immigrants but are meant to ensure that birth records do not fall into the wrong hands.
Most Texans pick up a birth certificate by showing a driver’s license. But illegal immigrants lack many of the approved forms of identification, such as a license or foreign passport with a United States visa.
Illegal immigrants and their lawyers said local Texas registrars used to accept an ID card with a photograph issued to an immigrant by a foreign consulate. The matrícula, as the Mexican version of the consular ID is known, has been used by illegal immigrants to open bank accounts in Texas and receive other services. Although official Texas policy prohibited the use of consular IDs to obtain birth certificates, the prohibition was not strictly enforced until about 2013, when state officials in Austin began pressing local records clerks to follow the protocols, immigration lawyers said.
Texas officials say that the consular ID cards are not secure because the consulate offices do not verify the documents presented to obtain them, and that immigrants can use other types of identification to receive copies of birth certificates. The list includes student IDs, Medicaid cards, Mexican voter registrations, utility bills and paycheck stubs.
“There’s no other state that has locked people out the way Texas has,” said Jennifer K. Harbury, a lawyer with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid who is representing the children in the lawsuit. Plaintiffs in the suit are about two dozen families from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala and now includes 28 adults and 32 children.
In Mexico, a child born of foreign parents, shows their nationality as Mexican on their birth certificate, but does not became a citizen until they are 18 years old.
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