( CNN ) -- The women 's lives have taken different paths since the days they were born . Brenda Vazquez is a 29-year-old elementary school teacher in Matamoros , Mexico . Laura Castro lives across the border in Brownsville , Texas . She is a 32-year-old housewife who helps her husband manage several stores . They share one thing in common : Both say they were delivered by midwives in south Texas , but pressured by U.S. Border Patrol agents to deny their U.S. citizenship . Their problems began , according to attorney Jaime Diez , when a group of midwives along the U.S.-Mexico border were found guilty of selling birth certificates to people who were not born in the United States . `` Now all the midwives in the area are suspected of committing fraud , '' said Diez , who said his office regularly sees cases of people delivered by midwives in Texas . Some of them are struggling to get passports because officials question the validity of their birth certificates , he said . Others have been deported and had their identification documents confiscated at the border , he said . Vazquez , who Diez is representing in a federal lawsuit filed last week , said she was intimidated into signing a document swearing she was not a U.S. citizen at a border crossing in Brownsville , Texas , last year . `` He said , 'You 'd better cooperate with me , because if you do n't , you 're going to jail . I had to lie and say that I was not a citizen . ... I was quite scared . I was crying , '' the second-grade teacher said . A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said he could not comment about Vazquez 's case or other such cases `` due to pending legal action . '' Border patrol agents are `` obligated to ensure that documentation presented to establish citizenship is proper and correct and was issued to the person presenting the documents , '' spokesman Bill Brooks said in a statement . A 2012 report from the Texas Office of the Inspector General said a fraud investigation had been `` substantiated '' and Vazquez 's birth record had been flagged , noting Vazquez 's signed confession and the fact that officials found birth certificates for Vazquez in both the United States and Mexico . The report said the case would not be prosecuted because it was beyond the statute of limitations . Vazquez said her parents obtained the Mexican birth certificate so she could study in Mexico . Vazquez said she has never lived in the United States , but wants to fight to regain her citizenship . `` With crime as it is in Mexico , something might happen , and as a citizen I would go live there , '' she said . Laura Castro said she faced a similar situation with her mother and sister at the same border crossing in 2009 . `` My sister got desperate and signed the paper , '' Castro said . A border patrol agent told her that her mother had admitted to buying false identification documents for the family . `` He kept asking me the same thing , and I replied the same thing , that I was a citizen . ... I said I was not going to sign because I did nothing wrong , and they let me go . ... They sent me back to Mexico , '' she said . Nearly a year later , authorities returned Castro her U.S. passport after she filed a lawsuit , she said . But Castro said she remains frustrated . `` We were very humiliated . We were treated like criminals , '' she said . The issue has come up before . In 2008 , the ACLU sued the federal government on behalf of nine people , arguing that authorities were unfairly discriminating against passport applicants . `` For countless Latinos who were delivered by midwives in the Southwest ... trying to obtain a passport has become an exercise in futility , '' the ACLU said in a statement at the time . `` Although midwifery has been a common practice for more than a century , particularly in rural and other traditionally underserved communities , the U.S. government has imposed unsurpassable hurdles on midwife-delivered Latinos to prove their citizenship and eligibility for U.S. passports -- even when their citizenship has already been established in the past . '' In a 2009 settlement , the State Department agreed to a new set of procedures for such passport applications . But the settlement said the department denied the ACLU 's accusations , and noted that `` there has been significant fraud by midwives and other birth attendants certifying births as occurring in the United States when they have not occurred in the United States . '' Diez said U.S. authorities need to do more to address the problem . `` If they doubt that a person was born here and they ca n't criminally charge them , then give them a process in which they can send their documents to be investigated , give them a chance to be before a judge with a lawyer , and in which there could be a process in which they make things right . That 's how it should be when we are talking about the citizenship of someone , '' he said .
Suspicion of midwives has caused immigration problems for many , an attorney says . One woman says she was forced to deny her U.S. citizenship . Another says her passport was taken and returned a year later after a lawsuit . Score: 7