by Bob Quasius
Incredibly, many Latino U.S. Citizens cannot get passports, even a 30 year veteran of the Border Patrol! Read our news release about the spike in cases like these.
There’s two common denominators: they have Hispanic surnames and were delivered by midwives. In a few isolated instances, a handful of midwives earned extra money by preparing fraudulent documents for non-citizens, but now the reaction by the Departments of State and Homeland Security is way over the top and innocent citizens are denied their constitutional right to due process, to travel freely, etc.
The news story below mentions a settlement to the class action lawsuit, in which the Department of State agreed to consider applications of citizens delivered by midwives. However, the Department of State then denied nearly all the applications, and now another lawsuit has been filed, and the plaintiffs are seeking class action status! The numbers are now likely in the thousands, as compared to a handful years ago.
From Al:
The first criminal charges I filed as an INS Special Agent were under 18 USC 1425-Procurment of Citizenship or Naturalization Unlawfully. That is how you treat someone who has enganged in this illegal activity. But who is enforcing these laws today? No one. One of the components that makes up ICE today is the legacy INS Office of Investigations. What happened? where are they? Oh yeah I forgot they turned them into narcotics investigators. Its time for DHS to let CBP take over those resposibilities to enforce the crimminal statutes of the INA. These passport cases should be referred to ICE from DOS to investigate, surely if they determain a person is not a citizen based on thier application to procure citizenship documents then there has been a criminal violation of 18 USC 1425 and should be investigated.
Its pathetic that my fellow agent Silerio Vasquez was being denied his passport after serving his country in Vietman and on the Southwest Border. Silverio and I proudly served in the McAllen Sector of the United States Border Patrol under Chief Silvestre Reyes, now Congressman Reyes.
Al, during the Bush administration, the number of passport denial cases was typically 10-20 per year, all of them where there was genuine suspicion, for example birth by a midwife convicted of fraud. At first the Bush administration simply “filed” these cases without making any decision.
There was a class action lawsuit for writ of mandamus, and a federal judge ruled the DOS had to make decisions. By that time it was the Obama administration, which denied nearly all the applications. Now, those denied passports are suing to defend their citizenship, which can cost $5-$15K per case. There is a request for class action status pending.
Also, there has been a huge spike during the past two years. One attorney I talked to told me he gets 4-5 calls a day from Latinos birthed by midwives who were denied passports, regardless of who their midwife was and how much additional documentation they provided. The numbers of cases has likely spiked into the thousands! Many more simply don’t apply for passports out of fear they’ll be rejected, plus the hefty application fee.
Amazingly, the Obama administration is making a huge deal out of the disparate impact of voter photo ID laws, claiming disparate impact on minorities, but the only government agencies denying photo IDs to minorities are Obama’s DOS. Apparently Obama is only concerned when it comes to protecting vote fraud and views Latinos as largely a captured constituency!