US authorities have expelled at least 11 migrant women to Mexico with their newborn babies in the United States since March 2020 without being given the birth certificates that certify the babies’ US nationality, according to an investigation by the Fuller Project and the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’.
Several lawyers who work with asylum seekers on the North American border have revealed that these children born on American soil, and therefore legally citizens of the United States, were deported under the “zero tolerance” immigration policy promoted by the Former President Donald Trump. The new administration of President Joe Biden has done nothing to suspend this practice, the report denounces.
Migrant advocates suspect that the actual number of removal cases of migrant mothers with US-born children could be much higher because these “expedited removals,” as the administration calls them, have occurred far from public scrutiny and without public scrutiny. participation of lawyers.
The Guardian notes that Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy had more consequences than the separation of more than 5,000 children from their parents and the prolonged detention of children, “but these are less visible. Family separations and detention of minors who caused outrage inside and outside the United States are just “the tip of the iceberg.”
“National security agencies also detained 4,600 pregnant women between 2016 and 2018 and the number increased 52 percent between those two years. Several women detained also reported having suffered miscarriages and intrusive medical procedures,” explains the British newspaper.
‘The Guardian’ thus collects the testimony of a 23-year-old Haitian woman identified as Hélène, who was nine months pregnant when she crossed into the United States. She was taken into the custody of the border patrol when her waters broke and she was taken to a hospital in Chula Vista, California, where she gave birth to a baby girl.
Three days later she was discharged and half an hour later she was already back in Mexico, with her daughter, close to where she had crossed a few days before. Hélène was expelled by Title 42, “a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order issued during the start of federal government actions against the COVID-19 pandemic, last March “.
The rule allowed the CDC to summarily “kick out” all migrants who entered the United States without authorization, rather than allowing them access to the legal avenue to seek protection, even those seeking asylum.
The new US president, Joe Biden, has ordered a review of this and other policies of the Trump administration, but migrant advocacy groups have criticized his failure to take more concrete and swift measures to counteract the effects of the “zero tolerance” policy. of the ex-president.
