Fake Mexican birth certificates sold in Chiapas reveal how Latin American migrants seek protection from U.S. deportation and family separation
The intensification of raids in the United States has raised further concerns among Latin American migrants. If arrested, they will be sent back to their countries of origin, making a return trip nearly impossible.
Mexicans, however, as neighbors of the United States, will always be close to the families they left behind.
This is why many Latin Americans, especially Cubans, seek to buy documents that validate their Mexican citizenship, even if it costs them a considerable sum.
On the black market in Chiapas, a foreign migrant can obtain a birth or marriage certificate for between $1,500 and $2,500; Cubans and Haitians are the ones who most frequently resort to buying these documents, explains José Luis Abarca, a migrant rights activist.
The documents are issued from Civil Registry offices in Chiapas municipalities located in the border region.
The issued birth certificates appear registered in the Comprehensive Birth Certificate Printing System and contain a certified CURP (Unique Population Registry Code), which legitimizes them; however, they present flaws such as the lack of a marginal note regarding the birth registration and a birth certificate number, as detected by consular authorities.
“Now the business [is the sale] of birth certificates, because migrants who lost their status in the United States plan to return to Mexico, but with a Mexican passport, which makes it easier for them to apply for family reunification,” explains Abarca.
It has been detected that the birth certificates are sent by courier from Mexico to the United States so that migrants can obtain a passport at the consulates. With this document, if they are detained by immigration authorities, they avoid being deported to their country of origin.
The activist stated that officials from the Civil Registry of an indigenous municipality in Chiapas have resigned under pressure to “get involved in the business” of selling birth certificates.
Abarca points out that the document migrants prefer is the marriage certificate, priced between $1,500 and $2,000, which they can use to apply for temporary or permanent residency and naturalization in Mexico. The sale of this document, the activist says, is promoted from some countries, such as Cuba.
On December 5, the Tapachula Municipal Police and State Guard dismantled an internet café operating across from the offices of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar), an area where hundreds of migrants from Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America arrived daily to process their legal status.
It was in this municipality that five Cubans acquired the birth certificates they presented at the Consulate in Houston to obtain their Mexican passports, which triggered the alerts.
During the raid on the internet café, two men were found posing as lawyers and offering immigration services to foreigners through the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) or the National Institute of Migration (INM). They charged between 2,500 and 5,000 pesos, promising to obtain legal residency papers for migrants.
The alleged lawyers claimed to have been sent from Mexico City to expedite the process for the migrants; both are currently fugitives.
