Passports Denied: Mexican-Americans Can't Travel

Texas native David Hernandez, a decorated Army veteran who served his country in different parts of the world, can no longer see the world after his country denied him a passport.

Hernandez and other residents living in and around the U.S.-Mexico border are plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging that, in denying them passports, the U.S. State Department is engaging in a new kind of racial discrimination: non-citizen profiling.

"This all started when I sent them (the U.S. State Department) my passport and they sent me a letter saying that it wasn't sufficient. So, I sent them all kinds of documents -a baptismal certificate, military records, pictures of me in the pre-kindergarten, a copy of my grandmother's birth certificate that showed that she was an American citizen," he said, adding, "and that still wasn't enough. I knew something was wrong when they even started asking me for things like Census documents from the 1930's that don't even exist."

Hernandez and the other plaintiffs say that the U.S. government is denying them passports because they are persons of Mexican and Latino descent whose births were assisted by parteras, or midwives. "The law says that if you're born in this country, have parents who are or who get naturalized, you are a citizen," said Hernandez his voice cracking with anger and frustration. "We were all born here. We're all citizens. The only difference is that we're Hispanic, we grew up poor and we happened not to be born in a hospital. My mother had to pay a partera $40 instead."

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