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In early 2011, Donald Trump began doing two things: trying to raise his profile among influential Republicans and publicly spreading the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (You can read more of the history in this Times news story, as well as this one.)

So from the very beginning, a false claim about a dark-skinned American not really being an American has been central to Trumpism. Now, the idea appears to have become part of federal policy.

Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post reported this week that a growing number of Latino citizens in Texas were having their citizenship questioned and being denied passports. “The Trump administration,” Sieff writes, “is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.”