President Trump’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship in the future stipulates that babies born in the United States to undocumented immigrants, and some temporary foreign residents, will no longer be granted citizenship automatically.
Verifying citizenship at birth would be costly and difficult, complicated by the likelihood of inaccuracies and incomplete information, according to data scientists, former government officials and lawyers who have worked on citizenship cases.
For one thing, the current system for recording and handling vital records in the United States — official legal documents memorializing life events like birth, death, marriage and divorce — is highly decentralized.
Registering birth records is the responsibility of the jurisdiction where the event occurred, usually a town or county, according to the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, which represents vital records offices in all states and territories, along with New York City and the District of Columbia.
Most births occur in hospitals or licensed birth centers, where demographic and medical information about the child and parents is collected, and then sent to the state.
Home births, which have increased dramatically and now account for 1.5 percent of all births, typically require a parent to submit documentation to local agencies within a week, sometimes through a manual, paper process. About a quarter of home births are unexpected or happen without a medical professional present, making the process more cumbersome.
Parents sometimes delay selecting a name or may be reluctant to fill out the paperwork because of extenuating circumstances or personal beliefs. Failing to register until a year after birth, or even longer, is not unheard of. And family complications — such as questions over surrogacy — portend a “complex mess,” according to a forthcoming article by Scott Titshaw, a law professor at Mercer University.
State agencies eventually send the data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for statistical and health policy purposes. But privacy and confidentiality laws make it very difficult to access those records, said Amy O’Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute, and a former senior executive at the U.S. Census Bureau.
Ambitious federal database initiatives have sometimes been problematic, she cautioned, citing the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay Initiative to help agencies gain access to databases and verify eligibility before releasing federal funds. Last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget said the program had so far “failed as a tool for comprehensive screening.”
Should the Supreme Court side with the Trump administration, that would most likely require the creation of a new bureaucracy that could cost billions of dollars and take years to establish.
“There are likely to be people who fall into these gray areas, and ultimately, it’s going to result in a stateless class of people within our country,” said Andrea Senteno, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s mid-Atlantic office in Washington.
David W. Chen is a Times reporter focused on state legislatures, state level policymaking and the political forces behind them.
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