When he was a young lawyer, Muzaffar Chishti once asked a mentor why it would be a problem for U.S. citizens to carry papers as immigrants do.
“He looks at me and says, ‘What do you think, misery likes company?’” Chishti recalled. “That's sort of one way of looking at it. Just because immigrants are asked to carry doesn't mean that U.S. citizens should be subjected to the same sort of embarrassment.”
The United States’ aversion to requiring citizens to carry documents is deeply rooted in Americans’ sense of freedom, said Chishti, who’s now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute think tank.
“A lot of it comes from the reaction to totalitarian regimes like the Nazis and, you know, Franco's regime and Mussolini's regime, that this is what autocratic regimes do to coerce their citizens, and we are the opposite of that,” he said.
Even though there isn’t a requirement to carry proof of citizenship within the U.S., there has been talk of “papers, please” lately.
In Utah, lawmakers are considering a requirement to prove citizenship to vote in state and local elections, though it wouldn’t affect federal elections. The bill has already cleared the House. A review by election officials hasn’t found any widespread problems in the state. In Minnesota, citizens are being asked to prove their citizenship to immigration agents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in mid-January that anyone may be asked to validate their identity.
The U.S. does not have one single identifying document, and citizenship has not traditionally been questioned, said law professor Mackenzie Heinrichs, who got her degree from the University of Minnesota Law School and was speaking on her own behalf. She now teaches at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law and directs the school’s asylum/refugee clinic.
That status quo is connected to the birthright citizenship granted under the Fourteenth Amendment.
“We don't really have, like, an explicit system for, like, how somebody who is a citizen proves they're a citizen,” she said.
Still, since there are reports of citizens being detained by immigration agents until they can prove their status, Heinrichs understands that citizens might want to carry proof. Especially those who fear being targeted because of how they look.
In September, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of using race as a factor in immigration stops, along with language spoken or presence at locations like bus stops and day laborer pickup sites.
The best identification is a passport because it proves citizenship and includes a photo, Heinrichs said. But she noted it costs money and time to get one.
You might think that because of missions and membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it wouldn’t be a problem in the Beehive State. Only 60% of citizens in Utah had a valid passport in fiscal year 2024, according to the Center for American Progress. That placed Utah as the 10th highest on the list, behind states like Hawaii, Colorado, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Real ID-compliant driver’s licenses do not prove citizenship. Legal permanent residents can also qualify for them.
A birth certificate does prove citizenship, and people born in the U.S. can request a certified copy from their home state’s office of vital records, but they can be cumbersome to bring everywhere.
And as Heinrichs questioned, “Who wants to be carrying around their birth certificate?”
There is precedent for photocopies of identifying documents to be accepted, as they are in immigration court, but it can be up to an officer whether to push for more. If parents are worried about their kids being questioned at school, Heinrichs recommends keeping a photocopy of their birth certificate in their backpack or on their cellphone.
Tribal identification should also suffice, Heinrichs said, though Native Americans have reportedly been detained and questioned over their IDs.
The rules are different for noncitizens. The Trump administration revived the long-dormant 1940 Alien Registration Act, which requires noncitizens to register and carry papers. Some immigrants are already considered registered if they’ve submitted certain documents, but 2 to 3 million are not.
If asked about their status, anyone in the U.S. still has the constitutional right to remain silent, Heinrichs said, though doing so may come with consequences.
Since immigration agents can make arrests based on reasonable suspicion that the individual is in the country illegally, but citizens are not required to carry papers, people can get into tricky situations.
“I do think it is kind of hard to show that their suspicion is unreasonable, but if you truly believe it was unreasonable, your really only recourse then is to, like, sue the government for violating your rights,” Heinrichs said.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
Editor’s note: KUER is a licensee of the University of Utah but operates as an editorially independent news organization.
