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 federal enforcement apparatus. This assault operates through women’s bodies at every stage. And it proceeds despite the structural dependency of the American economy on the migrant labor these policies target—a contradiction that renders the dismantling of the American Dream not only unjust but incoherent. To understand the full arc of this betrayal, one must examine three coordinated fronts of legal attack, each targeting a different dimension of immigrant-origin citizenship.
The first front emerged in 2018 under the “zero-tolerance” policy, when ICE Directive 11,032.3 revoked the automatic release of pregnant detainees. The statistics alone tell a story of escalating state violence: Marissa McFadden, Christine Marie Velez, and Maria Mercedes Ávila document the consequences through a reproductive justice framework: ICE detained pregnant people 2,098 times in 2018, a 52 percent increase over 2016. A 17-year-old asylum seeker was held by the government to prevent her from accessing abortion until an emergency court order intervened. A 23-year-old was transferred between facilities six times in three months while pregnant, and eventually hospitalized for exhaustion. A 24-year-old Honduran woman delivered a stillborn baby in a South Texas detention facility; DHS classified the death in “its own category, along with miscarriages.” The authors conclude that the policy constituted reproductive violence—a “strategy of reproductive control” reflecting “the history and systems of policies and practices that rely on discrimination and racism to promote white nationalism.” This did not deter migration: apprehensions increased 38 percent within four months of implementation.
The second front is the January 2025 executive order on birthright citizenship, attacking the “born” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If enforced, the order would deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of children born annually to undocumented parents—an estimated 225,000 to 250,000 births per year to unauthorized immigrants, representing about 7 percent of all U.S. births—creating a multi-generational class of stateless residents who would grow up inside the country without ever belonging to it. Unlike the other two fronts—which target detained pregnant women and naturalized citizens respectively—this one strikes at the moment of birth itself, severing the constitutional link between being born on U.S. soil and becoming a citizen. This matters because it would turn children who today are full citizens into legal aliens in their own country, barred from voting, holding a passport, or sponsoring their parents for legal status—the very path Ilda Leal trusted in 1982. The order directly contradicts the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil and to repudiate the Dred Scott decision, and has been blocked by multiple federal courts as “blatantly unconstitutional.” If upheld, the policy would disproportionately affect Latino children (75 percent of those born to noncitizens) and could leave some children stateless if their parents’ home countries refuse to grant them citizenship. But its political message is clear: even the newborn is no longer safe from the enforcement apparatus
The third front is the June 2025 Department of Justice (DOJ) memo directing “maximal pursuit” of denaturalization, attacking the “naturalized” clause. Together, they constitute a pincer movement against the amendment ratified in 1868 to prevent the creation of a permanent underclass defined by birth circumstances. The denaturalization escalation is without precedent. Between 1990 and 2017, the DOJ filed an average of 11 cases per year. The current directive orders upward of 200 referrals per month. Civil denaturalization proceedings provide no right to counsel, no jury trial, and no statute of limitations, allowing the government to reach back decades into documentary records produced under the chaotic, under-regulated conditions of the 1980s border system. The Supreme Court in Maslenjak v. United States (2017) warned against giving prosecutors “nearly limitless leverage” over naturalized citizens and held that “small omissions and minor lies” do not justify revocation. The DOJ’s enforcement memo disregards this guidance.
The government’s own USCIS Policy Manual describes denaturalization as an exceptional judicial process requiring “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt.” Yet the government’s public-facing USA.gov page reduces denaturalization to cases involving “committing certain crimes,” omitting grounds that require no criminal conduct and no willful deception. This gap between what the government does and what it tells its citizens constitutes an independent failure of democratic accountability.
The reproductive justice framework reveals what legal analysis alone cannot: these policies operate through women’s bodies across a continuous arc. In 1982, women exercised reproductive agency through the constitutional promise of citizenship for their babies born on U.S. soil. In 2018, the state detained pregnant women and induced unwanted stillbirths. In 2025, women calculate whether to move up cesarean sections and whether to have children at all. The trajectory is agency, then violence, then anxiety—each phase building on the last, each inscribing state power onto pregnant bodies along racial and national-origin lines. A federal court in D.V.D. v. Homeland Security (2025) named what this pipeline produces at its culmination: “the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped.” This awaits at the end of the enforcement chain—for asylum seekers, for denaturalized grandmothers, for the women whose pregnancies ended in detention facilities.
Yet the structural contradiction remains embedded in the rationale behind the naturalization process. Mexico is the United States’ largest trading partner, with bilateral trade exceeding $800 billion. Mexican-born workers constitute approximately 70 percent of hired crop farmworkers. Immigrant women from Latin America sustain the care economy. Anna Boucher’s research documents that the sectors where these women work—domestic service and agriculture—are those most subject to exploitation, characterized by “the retention or revisitation of master-servant patterns.” Denaturalization removes the citizenship shield that partially protects workers in these sectors, replenishing the pool of exploitable labor while the economy continues to extract value from it.
The nation that recruited this labor, built its agricultural and care systems around it, and formalized $800 billion in trade with the countries of origin is now revoking the citizenship of the workers and threatening the birthright of their children. This is what the reproductive justice tradition identifies as a pattern in which “women of color’s reproductive capacity has constituted both a key engine for white power and wealth historically and a touchstone for those who want to distinguish the ‘value’ of women’s reproductive bodies by race.” This contradiction is not accidental: it is the logic of reproductive control in action.
So the bridge at Brownsville still stands. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens.” Women still cross that bridge. The question is whether the constitutional promise that Ilda Leal trusted in 1982 will survive the institutions now working to dismantle it—and how much suffering will accumulate, in women’s bodies and in their families, before the courts reach a final answer. What remains of the feminized foundations of the American Dream when the state that promised citizenship now polices, detains, and denaturalizes the very women who built it?
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