Americans walking or driving through a section of downtown Dallas this week are being stopped at barricades and told to produce identification or documentation explaining why they are there. This is an extraordinary security arrangement surrounding the Republican Party’s midterm convention that has many asking: when can the government demand that someone prove who they are and whether they belong in the United States?
The checkpoints surrounding the American Airlines Center and Victory Park are tied to security for President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and thousands of people expected for the two-day convention Wednesday and Thursday.
GOP officials claim the Dallas requirement is not a citizenship check, but it comes during an aggressive federal immigration campaign in which American citizens have been detained, questioned about their status and, in some cases, found that an ordinary government-issued identification card did not immediately end the encounter.
“The real question is, well, are police going to believe that you actually are a U.S. citizen when they stop you and they say: ‘Where’s your document?’” Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, said in discussing Trump’s immigration policies.
For Black America, the question reaches much farther back than the current immigration fight.
At one point in U.S. history, Black people carried papers for precisely that reason. Not driver’s licenses. Not passports for an overseas vacation. Not credentials for entrance into a political convention.
They carried documents proving they were free.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, free Black Americans in slaveholding jurisdictions could be required to register their status and obtain certificates of freedom, documents commonly called freedom papers. Those papers might record a person’s height, complexion, hair, age, birthplace, scars, and other distinguishing features.
A Black person could know he was free, his family could know he was free, and his community could know he was free, yet none of that guaranteed his safety when confronted by someone who demanded proof.
In 1852, Joseph Trammell, a free Black Virginia man, registered in Loudoun County and obtained a Certificate of Freedom. He protected the document inside a handmade tin box and registered repeatedly until slavery ended.
More than 170 years later, Trammell’s certificate and the little metal box that carried it are preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, an institution that the Trump administration remains active in trying to discredit and even abolish.
Free Black people faced kidnapping and sale into slavery. The National Archives has documented cases in which kidnappers exploited federal fugitive slave laws to seize free people.
The legal architecture surrounding citizenship was equally unforgiving, because the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted naturalization to “free white persons.” In 1857, the Supreme Court went considerably further in “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” ruling that Black people descended from enslaved Africans were not citizens within the meaning of the Constitution.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that Black people had been regarded as members of an “inferior order” who possessed “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The Civil War ended slavery, while the 14th Amendment attempted to destroy the constitutional premise behind “Dred Scott.”
Ratified in 1868, its opening sentence declared that all people born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens of the United States and the state where they live. Birthright citizenship was written into the Constitution after a war fought in a nation where millions of Black people had been denied citizenship altogether.
“We had to ensure citizenship to people born in the United States because the Dred Scott decision would have continued to allow the U.S. to deny citizenship to Black people, like me,” Rep. Summer Lee said to her colleagues in the House in a video posted to her social media Sept. 2. “Trump and Republicans are now trying to deny birthright citizenship to immigrants. And while the children of immigrants, of course, haven’t been subjected to chattel enslavement, these are kids who have only ever known this country, have only ever lived here. America is all they know.”
She challenged the idea of deporting people born in the United States.
“Are these people, some of whom are children, of course,” she said, “supposed to just be sent back to places that they’ve never been, and they have no connections to, just because Republicans believe that they’re not the right type of person to be an American citizen?”
A Potential ‘Show Me Your Papers’ System
Trump has repeatedly sought to restrict birthright citizenship. A federal judge last week blocked his newest executive order, ruling against another administration’s attempt to deny automatic citizenship to certain children born on American soil. The administration is also considering requiring some parents applying for U.S. passports for their American-born children to submit documentation establishing the parents’ own citizenship or immigration status.
At the same time, immigration enforcement has moved from the border deep into American cities, workplaces and neighborhoods.
The American Immigration Council warned that after the administration revived an alien registration requirement, certain noncitizens could face prosecution for failing to register and could be required to carry the proper documents. The organization described the consequences as a potential “show me your papers” system with implications extending beyond undocumented immigrants.
The Cato Institute reported that in the most recent data it examined, 79% of ICE arrests involved people with no criminal conviction, while 4% involved someone with a violent criminal conviction.
Encounters involving American citizens have made the question of proof considerably less theoretical.
In Minneapolis, a Somali-born U.S. citizen identified publicly only as Mubashir said federal agents tackled and handcuffed him while he was walking to get food. According to accounts of the encounter, Mubashir repeatedly told officers he was an American citizen and offered to show identification. He said they eventually took him to a federal building, fingerprinted him, and released him.
“I deserve to be here like anyone else — I’m a U.S. citizen,” Mubashir said afterward. “I can’t even step outside without being tackled — no question — because I’m Somali.”
U.S. citizens generally aren’t required to carry proof of citizenship. A driver’s license establishes identity and driving privileges but does not necessarily establish citizenship. A REAL ID verifies identity through federal standards for certain purposes, but it is not proof that its holder is an American citizen.
Richard Boswell, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, called it “most troubling” that American citizens might feel compelled to carry identification because they fear an immigration encounter.
“There is no reason why government officers can or should be questioning people about their citizenship without any reason to suspect that they are noncitizens who are here unlawfully,” Boswell said.
The debate grew after Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino wrote on social media, in response to discussion of Mubashir’s detention, “One must carry immigration documents as per the INA. A REAL ID is not an immigration document.”
The Immigration and Nationality Act does impose documentation requirements on certain noncitizens. It does not require American citizens to walk the streets carrying immigration documents proving their citizenship.
Today, a visitor can walk from the White House, where the administration’s immigration policies originate, to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and find Joseph Trammell’s freedom certificate.
That is why a phrase as simple as “show me your papers” can carry a meaning that reaches well beyond the document being requested.
Nicole Foy, a ProPublica reporter who has investigated the detention of U.S. citizens, put perhaps the simplest question directly to Bovino after he said a REAL ID was not an immigration document:
“Why does a U.S. citizen need to carry immigration documents?” Foy asked.
