A U.S. Attorney Bulletin article written by a DOJ litigator does not mention a list of suspect birth attendants and directs fraud investigators to public records on disciplinary actions from state licensing bureaus. The bulletin states: “Where the birth is attended by a midwife, the attorney should check with the issuing state to determine whether the midwife is registered and if there are any disciplinary actions or whether the midwife has been criminally prosecuted for fraud in other birth certificate cases.”591 A version of the list was produced through discovery in the Castelano litigation, “[t]hat version of the SBA List includes the names of 249 midwives who practiced in South Texas between 1961 and 1996.”592 More recent efforts to obtain information on policy directives or agency practice in identifying and listing (or potentially delisting) midwives and licensed physicians have been unsuccessful.593 The entire premise of the SBA list dragnet rests on a “tenuous at best” theory that because a birth attendant is suspected of fraud in one case, all birth attestations throughout their career are now suspect.594 This approach has swept many thousands of unwitting citizens under scrutiny.595 The uncertainty surrounding listing of birth attendants contributes to a general atmosphere of intimidation and surveillance among border communities in South Texas, the primary target of the current administration’s paralyzing “zero tolerance” policies. Contemporaneous birth record. The U.S. Attorney Bulletin article mentioned above provides the following guidance to attorneys defending § 1503 cases (discussed more fully in the Denaturalization Statutes section of Chapter II, Denaturalization) on behalf of the Department of State: [F]inding a contemporaneous record of birth is an important step in proving fraud in a contested section 1503 case, as there are usually competing birth certificates alleging two different places of birth. Where the birth certificate alleging birth in the United States is a delayed birth certificate, a contemporaneous record of foreign birth is “almost conclusive” evidence of birth in that country.596 Contrary to this guidance, practitioners in South Texas reported that in their cases the State Department routinely cites later birth registration in Mexico as grounds to deny or revoke passports.597 More generally, the rush to connect double registration with identity fraud ignores the realities of border culture and history. As one scholar has noted: For most of the twentieth century, Mexican citizenship law placed families in a bind if they returned to Mexico with U.S.-born children. Mexican law did not recognize dual nationality claims, deeming any acquisition of foreign citizenship, by birth or naturalization, to result in an automatic loss of all Mexican citizenship rights….Faced with the disjuncture between Mexican citizenship law on the one hand and the realities of circular migration and cross-border communities on the other, many 128 UNMAKING AMERICANS