Nearly a dozen migrant women with newborn children over the past year were returned to Mexican border towns without birth certificates for their U.S.-born children, according to findings from an investigation published Friday by the Fuller Project and The Guardian.
Under former President Trump’s administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March issued Title 42 as part of the government’s emergency responses to the coronavirus pandemic. The order states that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials may force migrants who illegally enter the U.S. back over the southern border without giving them the opportunity to request asylum or protection.
Friday’s investigation, which included multiple conversations with immigration lawyers, hospital records and legal documents, found that since the policy was implemented, at least 11 migrant women were sent by CBP officials to Mexican towns just days after giving birth in the U.S.
One woman, a 23-year-old from Haiti, was nine months pregnant when she arrived in the U.S. in July. Border patrol officials brought her to a California hospital when her water broke.
According to The Guardian, she was then brought back to Mexico upon being discharged from the hospital, without her newborn daughter’s birth certificate.
The incident marked just one of nearly 200,000 Title 42 expulsions recorded by CBP in the 2020 fiscal year.
A CBP spokesperson told the Fuller Project and The Guardian that the agency does not specifically track the number of women with U.S.-citizen newborns who have been expelled under Title 42.
“Per policy, CBP does not comment on individual cases due to privacy reasons,” the spokesperson said, adding, “Hospitals are responsible for providing birth certificates and CBP does not hinder individuals, regardless of immigrations status, from acquiring birth certificates for US citizen children.”
CBP’s press office did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
President Biden in a Tuesday executive order committed the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security to “promptly review” Title 42, along with other Trump administration policies seeking to curb immigration.
“The United States is also a country with borders and with laws that must be enforced,” the order states, while also acknowledging the need for improved “lawful pathways for migration to this country,” and to “restore and strengthen our own asylum system,” which Biden argues “has been badly damaged by policies enacted over the last 4 years that contravened our values and caused needless human suffering.”
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