A growing number of women from Mexico and Central America are crossing into Texas without documents in order to give birth, generating an expense of hundreds of millions of dollars for local hospitals.

Public hospital directors in the border area confirm that they are inundated with recent and not-so-recent immigrant women who come to give birth. The stream of undocumented women who go to public hospitals to give birth reaches as far as Dallas and Houston, they indicate.

More than 80 percent of the 15,590 births registered last year in the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas were women with Hispanic last names. The hospital does not register whether the women are legal residents or undocumented, given the federal mandate that hospitals attend any woman in labor.

In Houston, between 70 to 80 percent of the 10,587 registered births last year in the two main public hospitals, Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson, were from undocumented mothers. The percentage is even larger in public hospitals in South Texas border communities.

Immigrants “want a baby born in the United States and know that medical staff don’t ask for money right away,” explains Mario Rodríguez, an obstetrician in Starr County, on the border.

Anthony Falcón, an American member of the Mexico-U.S. Border Health Commission, said that what is experienced in Starr County is also seen in all of the municipalities between Brownsville and California.

“What you see here is happening in Brownsville, McAllen, El Paso, and San Diego,” he confirms.

Groups that seek harsher immigration laws call babies born in the United States to undocumented women “anchor-babies” because they provide their parents with a path to residency and citizenship. These groups estimate that each year in the United States around 360,000 “anchor-babies” are born. They warn that this number is growing.

“Once parents have an ‘anchor-baby,’ it becomes harder to deport them,” says Jack Martin, spokesperson for the American Federation for Immigration Reform.