simply fail to respond to requests for passport renewals.563 The impact of these measures is felt chiefly, if not exclusively, by British Muslims.564 As in the case of the United States, while the numbers are increasing, they remain relatively small. However, as here, the cases that are happening suggest disturbing shifts in the application of state power to the realm of citizenship, and a drastic degradation in the experience of citizenship by targeted minority groups. Kapoor and Narkowicz observe: Beyond these select cases, the significance of removing and cancelling passport [sic] lie in the symbolic nature of what the process represents and its elucidation on the nature of expanding state power. In this regard it represents much more than a restriction on one’s freedom of movement, an established right. It forms a way of restricting social, cultural, political and legal claims in a more permanent fashion. It represents a possibility for unmaking citizens.565 The distortion of law (and the bureaucracy that administers it) based on collective criminalization of certain groups runs through the complex negotiation of citizenship and alienage in the United States.566 For Yemeni-Americans, that distortion flowed from both a presumption of fraud and the expansion of a “security state” designed to respond to inherently collective “threats.” These same two sources of exceptional treatment of certain groups can also be seen in the growing contest over documentation of U.S. citizenship at the country’s southern border, explored in the next section. While the DOS-OIG’s recommendations address basic failures in establishing a culture of accountability in the State Department, more is needed to counter the underlying legal and institutional acceptance of practices collectively targeting the legal status of Americans from particular minority groups. As one scholar has argued: Citizenship is not an arbitrary status bestowed upon individuals in government offices stateside or abroad. Nor is it one that is self-evident or inferred from documents alone. It is, however, more easily defended by some individuals than others.567 The U.S. Southern Border “The Department of State, and the attorneys who are usually sent to defend suits here, are generally clueless when it comes to such matters as the fact that in deep South Texas, the river is an artificial border, dividing communities that are historically and culturally interconnected. … It appears the State 124 UNMAKING AMERICANS