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A side effect of this is something I have also pointed out many times. US Customs and Border Patrol claims very wide latitude in violating Americans' constitutional guarantees within the 100-mile border zone (in which I have lived, most of my life).

As a person who is frequently mistaken for Latino/Hispanic/Chicano, if they decide to harass me, no amount of documentation is a shield, because they can simply claim that my documents appeared to be forged or make up some other unfalsifiable lie.

gcvsa ⭐🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭

I could very easily spend an indefinite time in detention being tortured, causing irreparable damage to my life, my health, my finances, and my public reputation, as the result of the racist, sexist, or anti-LGBT whims of a DHS thug, and there would be no legal recourse for me, whatsoever. And if I attempted to resist in any way, I could be brought up on criminal charges or even summarily murdered.

All I'd get is a "sorry about that", while they sneer at me right to my face, if I even survived.

And there wouldn't even be any consequences to the personnel involved for having "made a mistake", because as @whknott points out, there is a legal shield doctrine that presumes that officers are always acting in "good faith", and obviously trying to prove otherwise is effectively impossible, unless someone blatantly admits otherwise and directly implicates themselves or fellow officers.

I am a natural born citizen of the United States. Like most natural born citizens, the only actual legal proof of citizenship I possess, because that is how it is normally done, under the provisions of Amendment XIV, is my birth certificate.

It is not customary in the US for people to carry around their birth certificate, and as I've already pointed out, police can and will simply claim that my documents "appeared to be false identification", even if I did carry it.

There is no system of national identification in the US. We have a de facto hodgepodge of state-issued driver's licenses, state (and/or municipally) issued birth certificates, Social Security numbers (which by law are not supposed to be identification documents), US passports, and immigration/naturalization papers.

In all of these categories, there are Americans who do not have and have never had one or more of these documents.

Rescinding birthright citizenship under Amendment XIV would require the government to definitively establish the citizenship status of all 330+ million people in America.

This is obviously an impossible task, but the techie douchebag billionaires and their subordinate tech worshippers behind the Trump Administration (Musk, Thiel, etc, and their little douchebag hacker boys) want to believe they can do all this by computer, and they don't care about any errors.

The reality is, it would take a generation or more to establish a national identity system, if we even wanted to do that—AND WE SHOULD NOT WANT TO DO THAT MUCH LESS ACTUALLY DO IT.

The reality is, they will simply round up whoever they think doesn't fit the Aryan Nazi model, "and let God sort them out".

Selective and discretionary enforcement is one of the greatest dangers to Liberty imaginable.

One of the greatest dangers we are now facing is the fact that the Silicon Valley culture of "move fast and break things", and "ship early, ship often"—ideas which should not and cannot apply to life critical applications—are now apparently the guiding principles of the people holding the reins of government in the US.

These values are how we have companies "disrupting" our streets and roads with "self-driving" vehicles that are obviously a serious threat to public safety.

Mistakes, even fatal mistakes, do not matter to these people. We are nothing but faceless, valueless, replaceable crash test livestock to them.

When they fuck up, there are no real consequences for them, just an "oops, we'll fix that in beta".

The maintenance of public safety, public health, and public order is inimical to "efficiency" and profit, because it absolutely cannot fail, or people are likely to be profoundly and irreparably harmed. There is no room for error.

These people are demonstrably psychopathic. They do not have any concern for the well-being of others. They are literally mentally deranged, and many of them are downright evil.

If America was ever in any way great, it was so because the people in control of government and industry by and large used to care about not harming people in some plausible fashion, for fear of reputation damage and loss of profit and power.

That is obviously no longer the case.

And a large part of the reason for that is that they no longer see customer relationships as important, precisely because they see us as faceless, replaceable livestock.

They don't need to maintain our goodwill, because they will simply move on to the next sucker, and there's nothing we can do about it, except take the loss of our hard-earned income.

That's also why nothing is repairable, anymore. Customer service is expensive. Why make things fixable, when you can simply force a new sale?

It's important for Americans, especially, to understand that nowhere in the "Bill of Rights", the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, that the word "citizen" does not appear even once, and in the original text of the Constitution as ratified, the word "citizen" is only used in conjunction with eligibility for certain offices, jurisdiction for certain types of court cases, and the "privileges and immunities clause" of Article IV, Section 2.

The fact is, the US doesn't make a big deal about citizenship, because it simply doesn't have that much bearing on a person's rights in the US, aside from being able to vote for certain public offices.

The obvious reason for that is that NO ONE was a US citizen when the US was established.

So why would we start now? Only because the fascists want to pretend we are a white, Christian nation, despite the actual Founders of this nation explicitly rejecting that idea.

The fascists want the power to revoke people's citizenship for arbitrary reasons. It's really that simple.

@lopta The point is just that there is no one way to prove American citizenship, and many American citizens can't prove their citizenship.

My German great-grandfather came to the US in 1924, my grandmother came to the US in 1928, and at some point became a naturalized US citizen because her father did, and that's how the law worked back then.

But, she had no paperwork to prove her US citizenship, so she couldn't get a passport, and was effectively an undocumented immigrant.

@gcvsa That came up in the UK: people who came in as children and qualified for citizenship were deported as (sometimes senior) adults after the government misplaced their paperwork. #Windrush