judicial proceedings. It may also indicate an overall increase in the number of passport denials and revocations on grounds of non-citizenship. • An increase in the number of bench trials held or set to be held since the beginning of 2017. • A likelihood that the number of trials ultimately held will be substantially greater than prior to 2017, given the number of pending cases and their current posture. The vast majority of challenges to passport denials and deprivations succeeds in reestablishing U.S. citizenship and securing fresh passports, but now at an even greater cost to the individuals concerned, their families and communities, and to the U.S. public purse. The Burdens of Proof: A Brief History of Documenting United States Citizens “The photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical reproduction, is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, report cards, letters, medical records, and the like) which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes the conception of personhood, identity ... which, because it cannot be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Early Documentation Schemes – Federalizing the Identification of U.S. Citizens Some of the earliest forms of identity documentation in the United States functioned to track and control movement within the country.490 “The United States issued its first passport in 1782, but for a long time passports were issued not only by the federal government but also, and more usually, by states and cities, by governors, by mayors, and even by neighborhood notary publics.”491 In 1856, Congress federalized the issuance of passports and mandated that only U.S. citizens could obtain one.492 In 1861, the secretary of state ordered that passports would be required to exit the United States, as a means of keeping people in the country for military service in the Civil War.493 As discussed in Chapter I, the Immigration Act of 1882 ushered in a new era of racially specific documentary surveillance of Chinese immigrants and their descendants. During the Chinese exclusion era, the country first experimented with the use of documentation requirements as a means of policing borders to exclude particular groups.494 The exclusion laws only applied to 116 UNMAKING AMERICANS