After all, the only reason that this problem exists is because every child of border-jumper born in this country is an American citizen -- and that means we must either let their law-breaking parents stay, deport the citizen children, or separate them. None of the options is attractive, as this article shows.

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and womenÂ’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

The case exposes a recurring quandary for immigration authorities as an increasing number of American-born children of illegal immigrants become caught up in deportation operations. With the Bush administration stepping up enforcement, the immigration agency has been left scrambling to devise procedures to deal with children who, by law, do not fall under its jurisdiction because they are citizens.

“We are faced with these sorts of situations frequently, where a large number of individuals come illegally or overstay and have children in the United States,” said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Unfortunately, the parents are putting their children in these difficult situations.”

The problem, of course, is that if we do not keep the border-jumpers locked up pending deportation, many of them will skip out on subsequent hearings -- indeed, many of them have done so at least once in the past, as was the case with the mother highlighted above. And what looks like a particularly cruel practice is, in fact, often the best way of balancing the need for the child to be cared for in a safe environment with the need of the government to keep tabs on their law-breaking parents. And as I have often pointed out in the past, these immigration criminals do have an option to keep their families together -- accept immediate deportation and take their children with them.

The problem would, of course, be easily solved by modifying the current understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment (or by an additional constitutional amendment) to exclude the children of individuals not citizens of the United States (or, perhaps, of those not legally present with some sort of permanent status). That way there would be no question of balancing the interests of a citizen child and an alien parent in most cases. Alternatively, we could establish a legal presumption that an illegal immigrant parent is automatically an unfit parent, which would allow the courts to strip such individuals of legal custody of their citizen children and their parental rights -- certainly something that would end the practice of crossing the border to have an anchor baby.

Liberals, of course, are up in arms over this story. As is so often the case, they side with the law-breaker over the rest of society. But I like the question asked by Jimmie at The Sundries Shack.

If the women profiled here had been arrested for theft, would the New York Times have written such a sympathetic article about them? I rather doubt it.

Indeed, we separate mothers and children (and fathers and children) all the time when a parent breaks the law. Sob stories like this one are not about concern for the children -- it is about pursuing the open-borders agenda of the Left.

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