Profiling

Regarding “Passports denied to Americans on border” (Page A3, Thursday), just when you think it can’t get any worse, the Trump administration has once again outdone itself in the field of ingratitude and injustice with its seizure of Latino passports and passport holders on the border. This is ethnic profiling. Under American law, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution.

Just because some Latina midwives apparently falsely recorded some children they delivered as American born, there is no justification to placing everyone (correction: all Latinos) delivered by a midwife in a border county under suspicion, much less under arrest. It is an outrage that the federal government is denying or seizing passports and indeed arresting people, including U.S. veterans, and threatening them with deportation unless they can dig up documentation from a generation ago proving they or their parents lived in the United States.

Under normal rules of evidence, the government should be required to provide evidence that the person or their parents lived outside the country, although even that would not preclude being born in the United States. It appears that the Trump State Department is trying to illegally rescind birthright citizenship without a constitutional amendment. Walter D. Kamphoefner, Bryan