Constitution slackens, giving license to the State Department to engage in an “end-run” around judicial denaturalization.682 Substantive due process protects the right to participation in family life as a fundamental right.683 Refusing the issuance of birth certificates interferes with parents’ ability to direct the upbringing of their children and oversee their education, and to travel with their children, including to develop bonds with other family members. For trans-border families, the interference can be especially grave. Equal Protection684 Like the “Fibbers” of the New Deal era, Mexican-Americans who were double-registered on both sides of the border as children experience the same shrinking space for outmoded coping mechanisms. The consequences can be dire. Where the burdens of modernizing identity management systems fall disproportionately on minority communities because of their way of life, and call into question their very membership in the citizenry as a result, constitutional safeguards are needed. Burdens fall disproportionately on groups based on other specific cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, and social class markers as well. In the Castelano case, the class-wide equal protection claim stated that, “a higher level of scrutiny imposed additional burdens” on the plaintiffs, “because they are citizens of Mexican descent or have Latino surnames and their births in southwestern border states were assisted by midwives.”685 These are serious indications of discriminatory targeting based on suspect classifications that have yet to receive due constitutional scrutiny, a systemic failure to protect American citizens that demands urgent attention. Conclusion The cases of passport denial and revocation explored in this chapter are symptomatic of an enduring challenge for the human rights field.686 States need citizens; in response to that need, states have established a political order in which they hold sovereignty in identifying (measuring, labeling, and “sifting”687) citizens from non-citizens. As noted by Hannah Arendt: Theoretically, in the sphere of international law, it had always been true that sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of “emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion”; the point, however, is that practical consideration and the silent acknowledgement of common interests restrained national sovereignty until the rise of totalitarian regimes.688 III. Denial and revocation of documentation of U.S. citizenship 151