even when their births in the United States are officially registered. In 2015, legal aid and civil rights organizations brought an action on behalf of citizen children who were denied birth certificates by the Texas Department of State Health Services due to a policy regarding acceptable forms of identification required of their parents.656 The parents or guardians of affected children were citizens of Mexico who used highly secure identification issued by Mexican authorities as proof of identity for the purposes of gaining birth certificates for their children. The case settled in 2016, with the state agreeing to accept certain additional forms of documentation issued by Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala as proof of identity in order to register and obtain birth certificates for U.S.-born children.657 Practitioners consulted in the preparation of this report have confirmed that access to birth certificates for border communities remains a fundamental challenge.658 Birth registration in the United States is not a requirement in order to obtain U.S. citizenship. If a state’s identity and vital statistics infrastructure is susceptible to charges of unreliability or allegations of pervasive fraud, it places vulnerable citizens at risk of arbitrary denationalization, as is readily apparent from the Dominican Republic example explored in the Comparative Case Studies section of Chapter I. Another risk is that public narratives dislodged from factual realities of state or national public administration can spur aggressive policies that do more harm than good. For example, recent challenges to the validity of Texas voter rolls presented a threat to communities (in this case, naturalized Americans) whose authenticity as U.S. citizens is increasingly called into question. In January 2019, after an 11-month investigation, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley forwarded lists totaling 100,000 names of alleged non-citizens listed on voter rolls to county election officials for verification.659 Almost immediately, the program came under scrutiny when tens of thousands of those named were confirmed as U.S. citizens. When a federal judge halted the effort one month later, he characterized the exercise as “ham-handed,” and noted, “The challenge is how to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack of 15 million Texas voters.”660 The secretary of state and other state defendants rescinded the effort in a settlement agreement with civil rights groups in April 2019.661 The judge’s description of the actual governance task at hand reflects a reality that is too easily lost in public narratives where allegations of massive voter and identity fraud abound. The potential to scale fraud-prevention measures more rapidly than ever demands an equally sophisticated vigilance of the aims and needs of local systems, and the exercise of restraint in the face of seductive new tools that promise an easy solution to complex governance issues. In a 2009 report by the National Research Council Committee on National Statistics, the authors note the emerging role of vital statistics at the “front lines in national security efforts.”662 The December 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act set minimum standards to “secure birth certificates.”663 An intensified role for vital statistics data collection in III. Denial and revocation of documentation of U.S. citizenship 147