A Rush for Birth Certificates, as Immigrants Try to Hold Families Together

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/nyregion/immigrant-families-birth-certificates.html

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During a time of great uncertainty, when a knock at the door can upend a life lived in this country for more than a decade and tear a family apart, it is best to be prepared.

That, at least, is the view of Esmeralda Mosso.

So on a soggy morning last week, she joined the scores of people who have been descending on the offices of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Lower Manhattan to get the paperwork needed to ensure that whatever happens, she and her children will not be separated.

Ms. Mosso is an undocumented immigrant who moved here 12 years ago from Guerrero State in Mexico.

Two of her children, however, are American citizens.

She was waiting in line to get official copies of their birth certificates, which she needed for passports and so they could apply for dual citizenship with Mexico.

“I’m prepared to go, but with my children,” she said. “Without them, I’m not going. Even if they use a crane, I’m not going without them.”

Her situation is hardly unique.

Of the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally, some 33 percent — 3.3 million people — live with at least one child who is an American citizen, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group.

The city’s health department, which runs the Bureau of Vital Statistics, said in-person requests in January were up 23 percent from a year earlier, with 7,421 people asking for documents — a record number. For days last week, the line for birth certificates stretched out the door at 125 Worth Street, the bureau’s office, and around the block.

The city has added extra hours and staff to meet the demand.

Many of those in line, interviewed over five days, were there because they either had lost the original documents or, like Ms. Mosso, were getting duplicates to satisfy the bureaucratic demands of the State Department to obtain a United States passport, or those of a home country. Ms. Mosso was going to take her new copies to the Mexican Consulate.

“I think, over all, the fear over what is going to happen to families has skyrocketed,” said Camille J. Mackler, the director of legal initiatives at the New York Immigration Coalition. “In the community they are asking about what can they do to protect their children.”

The Trump administration has said it is targeting undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes for deportation. But as stories swirl of deportations of longtime residents with only minor infractions in their past, Ms. Mosso said that fear had gripped those in her neighborhood.

For weeks, “we didn’t leave our homes,” she said. “We had to be inside, locked up.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed to fight efforts to deport people not convicted of serious crimes, and his office has been working to inform undocumented immigrants of their rights.

Over the last year, the city has offered guidance to immigrants at 2,000 events throughout the five boroughs, reaching hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

One of the things lawyers are telling people like Ms. Mosso, 38, is to be prepared for the worst and to get their paperwork in order to keep their family together.

The Consulate General of Mexico in New York says it has seen a 30 percent increase in dual-citizenship requests from Mexican parents with American-born children in the past two months.

“This is a recommendation we’ve made for Mexican parents,” said Carlos Gerardo Izzo, the consul for public affairs at the consulate. “Not only now, but always.”

He added, “It gives the consulate more tools to intervene in case the children are separated from their parents.”

Ms. Mosso’s case is further complicated because while her 3-month-old and 5-year-old children are citizens, her 15-year-old daughter is not.

“She’s afraid,” Ms. Mosso said. “She doesn’t want to go. She wants to stay here.”

While Ms. Mosso said she was prepared to leave if she must, she would be returning to a country that in many ways is unfamiliar to her.

Guerrero, the southwest state where she was born, is regarded as the capital of Mexico’s heroin trade and has one of the highest homicide rates in the country.

She hopes to remain in New York, where she spends her days working in a bakery in Brooklyn making Russian delicacies. She took comfort, perhaps fleetingly, in the notion floated by President Trump last week, when he suggested that he might be open to allowing people like her, who have been in the country for years without getting into legal trouble, to remain.

But for now, there is only uncertainty for her and her family.

“It’s because of fear for our children, not fear of getting deported, but fear for our children, that they wouldn’t let them out,” she said. But as this new normal sets in, she said, they have no choice but to get on with life.

“We’re going to work,” she said, “with lots of energy.”