legal protection against harm permits an unacceptable degree of affirmative targeting and state-sanctioned profiling based on race, gender, and class in this domain, with disastrous consequences for targeted communities. Passport denial and deprivation leaves the affected person in a state of limbo. The impact does not wholly invalidate a claim to U.S. citizenship, but portends that ultimately the individual will not be able to live as a U.S. citizen, or, in the case of naturalized Americans, that they are likely to face denaturalization if located in the U.S. or permanent exile if they are abroad. Citizens by birth on the territory who happen to be outside the U.S. when their passport renewal is denied or their passports are revoked on grounds of non-citizenship must effectively apply for readmission as aliens. This means subjecting themselves to the full force of anti-immigration measures now in place, including indefinite periods of detention, family separation, and possibly criminal prosecution resulting in permanent bars to reentry into their own country. Citizens within the U.S. who suffer passport denial or deprivation cannot travel abroad, which acutely affects transnational families who may be suddenly separated by a hard border and cut off from livelihoods that have sustained them for generations. The introduction of new technologies that promise unprecedented precision in identification cannot fix the problems of discretion and bias built into U.S. institutions. New technologies like the HART database (described in Chapter II, Denaturalizations) also create unprecedented capacity in the hands of the state to identify and target supposed “threat” communities and engage in collective punishment, rhetorically justified by the demands of fraud prevention and national security. In highlighting the largely unexamined risks to civil and human rights posed by the discretion built into the status quo, this chapter proposes, urgently, a new culture of restraint and accountability in the exercise of such expansive powers. Research undertaken by the Justice Initiative in preparation of this report focused on the implementation of these practices along the southern U.S. border, in the Rio Grande Valley. There, immigration attorneys and affected individuals described an expanding effort to deny passports, and a more intensive and centralized effort to defend passport denials by the Department of Justice (which defends the Department of State when its actions are challenged in court). In April and May 2019, the Justice Initiative, with the support of pro bono attorneys, undertook empirical research on citizenship cases filed in the Southern District of Texas between August 3, 2014 and May 31, 2019 in order to investigate further these qualitative findings. In total, 111 cases were identified, and the process used in establishing this case list is presented in the Description of the Research section of this report’s Executive Summary. This analysis revealed the following key findings: • A significant increase in the number of cases filed by plaintiffs seeking to (re-)establish citizenship since the beginning of 2017. This correlates with the observation by practitioners that fewer cases are being resolved administratively prior to the initiation of III. Denial and revocation of documentation of U.S. citizenship 115