Department considers the Rio Grande Valley to be a proving ground, and, instead of deploying a pool of attorneys who regularly defend cases here, it consistently sends new hires, as if for training.”568 -Lisa Brodyaga American citizens living along the southern border of the U.S.—many of whom speak Spanish and come from trans-border families—have, since at least the 1990s, increasingly struggled to reconcile their daily lives with “racialized presumptions” ingrained in the country’s rapidly centralizing administrative state.569 The presumptions in this case hold that there is mass identity documentation fraud by parents in the Rio Grande Valley falsely claiming their children were born in the United States.570 Extreme rhetoric by the Trump administration, warning of a foreign “invasion”571 across the border, reflects a politically instrumentalized and mendacious version of these long-held attitudes, now embedded in the bureaucracy of the southern borderlands.572 In late August 2018, the Washington Post reported on a surge in passport revocations affecting individuals of Mexican heritage born within the United States, but often outside of hospitals with the assistance of local midwives.573 The State Department disputed the story, denied that a policy change had occurred, and indicated that according to its information, passport revocations in “midwife cases” were at a six-year low in 2018.574 Based on the Justice Initiative’s subsequent review of cases filed in the Southern District of Texas, there has been a significant increase in recourse to the courts in passport cases: 42 cases were initiated between mid-2014 and the end of 2016, while 69 cases were initiated between January 1, 2017 and May 31, 2019, an increase of approximately 64.5%. Attorneys who have litigated passport cases in South Texas for a decade or more stated that, in addition to increased court cases, there has emerged an indifferent, even punitive attitude on the part of the government: “Sometimes it appears they really don’t care if the person is a citizen or not.”575 Challenging passport revocations entails affirmative civil litigation in federal court (as reviewed in the Technical Roadmap section below). There is no right to counsel in such cases, and legal aid organizations are overwhelmed and not necessarily specialized in the complex regulatory and legal frameworks under which claims must be constructed. The handful of attorneys in South Texas with expertise in this field reported that, under the Trump administration, the Department of State and the Department of Justice have taken new approaches to such cases. They note that: • Lawyers from outside of the region and unfamiliar with the local context increasingly appear on behalf of the government in passport cases.576 III. Denial and revocation of documentation of U.S. citizenship 125