Immigration lawyer Jaime Díez joined Chuck Todd Thursday to discuss the abomination taking place in Texas at the Mexican border, where passports are being revoked or denied to American citizens on the basis of their ethnicity and circumstances of their birth.
As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, passports are being denied to American citizens who were born near the Texas-Mexican border, where the delivery was handled by a midwife.
As Díez explains in the segment above, the crackdown is brutal. It includes putting people in rooms where government officials try to force them to admit they were not born in the United States, regardless of what their birth certificate says.
"Their mothers have been asked to come to the consulate to admit they were not born there and they are detaining them," Díez continued.
"There are many clients of mine that were born in the United States that the government has stopped and kept them in Mexico," he told Chuck Todd. "And the crackdown is starting to be very hard.
He went on to describe his practice on the Mexican border, insisting that the majority of his clients were born in the United States. "We even have a soldier that was born with a midwife and he applied to be a soldier and they took him in," Díez recalled. "He applies for a passport and they say show you're a United States citizen."
So much for that whole "honor the veterans" nonsense this administration spews when it's convenient.
Chuck Todd asked Diaz if he had any clients who didn't have a Hispanic surname who had their passport taken away.
Can you guess the answer? Yes, I could too.
This is outrageous. These people are citizens, entitled to the protection of the United States constitution, entitled to due process, entitled to some damn respect. We are talking about people who have been citizens all their lives and are now being mistreated because they were delivered by a midwife decades earlier.
Is this supposed to make us forget about baby jails and the fact that 500 children are STILL not reunited with their parents? Because it's not working.
This is authoritarian, racist, and illegal, in my opinion. I sure hope there are some Constitutional lawyers working to intervene on their behalf. Otherwise they'd best start asking us -- even lily-white people like me -- for the very same kinds of verification.
In fact, I think I will apply for a passport as an experiment (I don't have one). And I will see if they ask me to produce my mother to verify that I was actually born where my birth certificate says I was. Anyone want to take bets on that?
An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Jaime Díez' name as Jaime Diaz. I regret the error.
