One of the little noticed effects that the current administration* has had on the country is the fact that citizenship itself has gone up for grabs, and that phenomenon goes far beyond the depredations of ICE and the cruelty of family separation. It even goes beyond the burgeoning effort to trim back the 14th amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship.

All over the country, people who never dreamed their citizenship would be in question are discovering how easily They become You when brainless authoritarians are in charge. From KCTV in Kansas City:

[Gwyneth] Barbara had been issued a U.S. passport before, but this time around, Barbara was told her birth certificate wasn’t good enough to prove her citizenship. “It’s like they’re retroactively declaring that I was never a citizen,” Barbara said. Barbara was born in a farmhouse in the 1970s in Leavenworth County. She had a birth certificate. Her father went to the courthouse days after she was born to certify her birth -- raised seal and all.

The local passport agency accepted her documentation as satisfactory for her passport application. Days later, she received a letter from the federal division of the U.S. Passport Agency out of Houston, TX, telling her the application was denied and required further documentation. “I have a birth certificate it was accepted before, why wouldn’t it be accepted again?” Barbara explained. The letter stated, because her birth certificate was not issued at a institution or hospital, it was not considered proof enough of her citizenship.

Jeff Greenberg Getty Images

Please note that the local passport agency had no problem with Ms. Barbara's renewal. It was only when her application started rising toward the top of the bureaucracy, where the administration*'s influence grows greater the higher you go, that she ran into this idiocy.

She received a letter asking her to submit any number of the listed additional documents. “Border crossing card or green card for your parents issued prior to your birth? My parents were born in the United States….Early religious records? We don’t have any. Family Bible? They won’t accept a birth certificate but they will accept a family Bible?” Barbara said. Meantime, she did her best to dig up any of the random documents she was be asking to provide. “I was absolutely furious ... I went to sleep yelling at the passport agency in my head. I woke up yelling at them in my head,” she said.

You can see where this is headed. Ms. Barbara got caught up in a system that has been hijacked by people so hellbent on kicking brown people out of the country that the pressure to do so is causing the system, to say nothing of the whole concept of citizenship, to become deranged. It doesn't take much to turn Us into Them. People should remember that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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