The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2015 35 show your emotion to the State Department,” or “Expect most of what you write to be rewritten by someone else,” or “You have to make your point—without making enemies.” Their support was quiet, but invaluable. Without it, our efforts would likely have been dead in the water. And when it looked at one point like the cable might die in clearance, I had their encouragement to write an op-ed for The Foreign Service Journal . So that is what I did. I wrote a cable with a colleague for inside communication to the department (with clearances) while simultaneously writing a personal opinion piece (no clearances) for a wider public. 3. Seek allies and collaborators. As part of the cable-writ- ing process, we reached out to other border posts in Mission Mexico, to get a sense of their numbers of denials to unwed mothers attempting to transmit citizenship. Not every post responded, but the ones that did supported our position. They also provided breadth and depth in describing the challenges to adjudicating the physical presence requirements of unwed mothers as a regional issue affecting hundreds, if not thousands of women each year. When one considers the length of our land borders with Canada and Mexico, the numbers of unwed U.S. citizen moth- ers who cannot transmit citizenship due to Section 309(c) of After decades of silence on this issue, what are the chances that two cables would come from separate border posts in Mexico and Canada on the same day? Our entire ACS section in Tijuana cheered.