Who Gets Counted as Human
Mexico, like the United States, extends citizenship to children born within its borders, and that basic fact lands hardest in Tijuana, where Vivianne Petit Frere’s brightly painted Haitian restaurant, Lakou Lakay, sits blocks from the towering U.S. border wall. The name Lakou Lakay means “home” in Haitian creole, and Petit Frere said it reflects her family’s deepening roots in their adopted homeland, where her granddaughter was born two years ago and automatically became a Mexican citizen.
That small legal stamp of belonging stands in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s push to deny birthright citizenship in the United States to children whose parents are living in the country illegally or have temporary legal status. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in soon on the constitutionality of Trump’s birthright citizenship order, which he signed on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, amid his Republican administration’s broad immigration crackdown. In April, Trump posted on Truth Social: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”
The article says about three dozen countries, mostly in the Americas, guarantee automatic citizenship to children born on their territory, including Canada, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico. The machinery of citizenship, so often treated like a neutral administrative detail, decides who gets papers, who gets mobility, and who gets trapped under the border regime.
What the Border Regime Does to Families
Petit Frere fled Haiti in 2019, traveled from Brazil and walked through the Panamanian jungle to Mexico while chasing the so-called American Dream with the intention of crossing the border and settling with relatives in Florida, but she said that was an illusion and that Mexico opened its doors. Her restaurant’s name symbolizes, in her Haitian culture, a shared space affording a sense of belonging. On the walls, she has framed signs in Spanish, English and Creole that say, “Every dish tells a story, every detail connects cultures,” and, “We aim to promote an authentic cultural exchanges between two peoples with similar historical roots yet where Haitian identity proudly blossoms on Mexican soil.”
Petit Frere has lived in Tijuana for just over five years, during which she has established a thriving business, become fluent in Spanish and is getting a degree in social work. She welcomed the first generation Mexican in her family, her granddaughter, Alexca. The report says there are no figures on how many children born to noncitizens have received Mexican birthright citizenship. Tens of thousands of Haitians are living in Mexico. In 2021, when Mexico saw a significant increase in Haitian migration, at least 10 percent of arriving Haitian women were pregnant, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration.
Petit Frere was born in French Saint Martin, a Caribbean island that does not offer automatic birthright citizenship. She and her mother, who is Haitian, were deported to Haiti when she was 6. Petit Frere said she left Haiti seeking a better life and was dismayed to discover that when her teenage daughter left Haiti to be reunited with her in Tijuana three years later, she was nearly five months pregnant. Petit Frere said she had been a teen mother herself and had hoped for a different path for her daughter.
Papers, Passports, and the Price of Belonging
Petit Frere said her granddaughter, Alexca, a bubbly toddler who giggles and runs about, has conquered her heart, and that she is grateful her granddaughter was born in Mexico rather than Haiti, where surging gang violence has left more than 1 in 10 homeless. Petit Frere said a Mexican passport would make travel easier because traveling with a Haitian passport is considered extremely difficult, with few nations allowing holders to visit visa free. “As a Mexican citizen, she will have more opportunities,” Petit Frere said.
Petit Frere said that is also true for her three nieces who were born in Brazil and made automatic citizens there. She said she and her daughter had permanent residency in Mexico before her granddaughter was born, but other parents in Tijuana’s Haitian community did not. Mexico allows the parents of children with birthright citizenship to become permanent residents. Petit Frere said, “There are a lot of children in Tijuana who are 6, 7, 8 years old now who are Mexican and their parents who are Haitian did not have legal status but now have become permanent residents because their children were born here.”
Petit Frere has started the paperwork to become a Mexican citizen, which would make it easier to expand her business, she said. She also is a community organizer with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, advocating for the Haitian migrant community, and said she hopes to pursue another degree in international migration, possibly through a U.S. university. “The children of immigrants are proving to be the most outstanding in the world,” she said. Trump’s efforts to limit birthright citizenship, she said, “could just be out of jealousy.”
When the Courts and Councils Decide
In the United States, birthright citizenship was enshrined after the Civil War through the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, in part to ensure former slaves would be citizens. The right was expanded to immigrants’ children in the late 1800s when the Supreme Court ruled nearly anyone born in the U.S., no matter their parents’ legal status, has citizenship. The practice, many legal historians believe, dates to the 1600s and 1700s, when European rulers encouraged migration to the expanding American colonies. Those colonists wanted any of their children born overseas to retain European citizenship. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, said, “you’re a citizen as long as you’re born within the domain of the king, of the monarch,” and added, “But the legal tie between the home country in Europe and the settlers remained strong through the promise of birthright citizenship.”
The article also says that in 2007, the Dominican Electoral Council officially ordered the denial of citizenship to all children born to parents without legal status. Six years later, a Dominican court applied it retroactively to 1929. Over a decade later, as many as 130,000 people remained stateless despite passage of a law in 2014 to correct the court decision after it drew strong international condemnation, according to the Center for Migration Studies of New York. The law now impacts the next generation, which remains vulnerable to deportation.
The whole arrangement shows how citizenship is handed down, withheld, and weaponized by institutions that sit above the people they sort. In Tijuana, Petit Frere’s family built a life around a child who was automatically recognized by the state. Elsewhere, councils and courts have stripped that recognition away, leaving people stateless and exposed to deportation while officials call it order.