You may have heard that the Del Rio, Texas school district is policing a bridge that crosses the border with Mexico. Children crossing the bridge to attend school in the morning have been given letters seeking verification of their residency and explaining that non-residents will be expelled.

When you live in walking distance from the US-Mexico border, Newsweek points out, “the distinction between the U.S. and Mexico can get blurry—often children will pay visits on the weekend to family members who reside in Mexico and cross the border again Monday morning to go to class.”  Indeed, given recent rates of deportation, it is not at all unlikely that some children have (deported) parents living on one side of the border, while their citizen or permanent resident parents reside in Texas.

The trouble is that some of the students, allegedly, were crossing from Mexico every day to attend class in Texas.   And although public schools in the U.S. are forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause from denying education to children on the basis of their immigration status, schools do, of course, have the legitimate right to verify students’ residency in the district.  As the superintendent of the Del Rio district states, “It’s very simple. If you reside in the district, you can go to school. . . . . Texas has the same residency issues not just with children from Mexico but with children from Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.” (An attorney for the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund asks, “Why isn’t the school district setting up a roadblock on the east side of town to see if students are coming from an adjacent school district?”)

I read about the controversy on a number of different websites, and you can probably imagine the character of many of the comments.  But one particular exchange played into a question that I have become a little obsessed about recently:  who is an “American”?  Is an “American” identified by legal citizenship?  By something more?  By something different from that altogether?