In November 1982, The New York Times reported on a phenomenon reshaping the U.S.-Mexico border: Mexican women crossing into Texas to give birth so their children would be American citizens. 27-year-old Ilda Leal walked out of her house in Matamoros while in labor, caught a bus to the international bridge, showed border guards her 72-hour visitor’s pass, and walked five blocks to the home of a lay midwife whose front door bore a sign reading “Se Atienden Partos—Births attended here.” Four hours later, Abiel Leal Jr. was born an American citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment. Mrs. Leal explained her reasoning: “They have better rights, protect the children more.” The practice was legal. The Immigration and Naturalization Services agent in Brownsville confirmed: “We don’t stop pregnant women at the border.” In Cameron County alone, lay midwives delivered 2,303 babies that year, nearly a third of all births, half or more to Mexican nationals. This was a feminized infrastructure of constitutional exercise: women caring for women in domestic settings, in Spanish, at $150 to $200 per delivery, within a tradition that valued relational care.

The midwives prefigured the contemporary care economy that the United States depends on but refuses to protect—the home health aides, nannies, elder-care providers, and domestic workers, disproportionately women of color from Latin America, whose labor sustains American households while their legal status remains precarious. What Mrs. Leal did was an act of constitutional interpretation performed through the body. She understood the Fourteenth Amendment. She understood the 1977 law allowing her U.S.-citizen child to sponsor her for legal status at age 21. She understood the calculus of time. The “American Dream” at the border was a maternal project: conceived by women, delivered by women, sustained by women’s care labor on both sides of the border. The women crossing the bridge were not gaming the system. They were trusting it.

But forty-three years later, a different scenario has emerged. Miriam Jordan reported for The New York Times on undocumented women across the country asking a question unthinkable to Ilda Leal: will my unborn child be a U.S. citizen? On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies not to issue citizenship documents for children born to mothers unlawfully in the United States. Nivida, a 28-year-old Honduran in Louisiana with a U.S.-citizen daughter, expecting a son in April of that year, said: “He hasn’t even been born and he already has to live in hiding.”

Between these two moments lies the arc of a promise once made and now being broken. The binational citizenship phenomenon that began in the early 1980s under the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship is under coordinated institutional assault from the executive branch, the Justice Department, and the........

© E-International