State: Birth Certificate Lawsuit a Ruse to Validate Foreign ID’s
Attorneys for the state of Texas argued in federal court in Austin on Friday that a lawsuit joined by dozens of undocumented Texans has nothing to do with their U.S.-born children being denied birth certificates by the state vital statistics unit. Instead, the attorneys claimed, the suit is a ruse to compel the state to accept Mexican consulate-issued identification.
“This is more about the legitimacy of the matricula, I’m just throwing that out there,” argued Thomas Albright, an assistant attorney general for the state, referring to the contested form of photo identification that Department of State Health Services (DSHS) says it will not accept, and has never accepted, as proof of identity for undocumented parents seeking birth certificates for their American-born kids.
Friday was the first time attorneys have appeared in court over the lawsuit, which was originally filed in May by four undocumented women from the Rio Grande Valley who allege that the state has wrongly denied them access to their children’s documents. They allege that in previous years, the state accepted the matricula consular for their now-older children as part of a selection of documents parents could use to prove their relationship. The matricula is a photo ID that the Mexican consulate issues to Mexican nationals living in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman warned attorneys for the state of Texas to abandon previous written arguments they’d made against the “importance” of having a birth certificate at all — “You shouldn’t be spending any more ink or time on that one,” he said — and asked counsel on both sides to convince him that the current “scheme” devised by the state concerning families’ abilities to obtain birth certificates either is or is not constitutionally appropriate.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/undocumented-texans-take-birth-certificate-suit-to-court/
[font color=330099]What's the over/under that Texas will spend over $1 million losing this lawsuit?[/font]
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