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yubblegum

I have made multiple photocopies of my US passport (naturalized) that I have put in my wallet, backpacks, etc.

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That won’t help you if they decide that they don’t like you.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-citizen-arrested-by-ice_n_...

In another article, I read a US citizen being detained despite showing a copy in his phone: https://archive.is/0WXZR

Edit: actually I'm not sure if he got the chance to show the copy, that info seems ambiguous:

> The federal agents who detained Mubashir refused his repeated attempts to show them a copy of his passport on his phone or provide his name and date of birth to prove his citizenship, he said. Instead, they insisted he allow them to take a photo of him to make the verification, according to Mubashir.

You can get a card version of your passport that is the same size as your driver’s license. There’s no need to photocopy your actual passport book

Its all a moot point because if they want to arrest you, then it doesn't matter what you show them. They're going to arrest you anyway, and suffer no consequences for doing so.

“Giving up and dying” is a personal preference that we don’t all share.

It certainly wasn't a preference that I was advocating for. Odd that's what you saw in my comment.

TIL. Thanks, good to know.

I wouldn’t expect them to accept photocopies of a passport

I would hope that they have access to a tool to look up the passport by number and confirm that the details match the copy and the photo appears to look like the person.

They do, but it can and will be ignored, based on events to date. The goal is to create ambiguity to enable a power imbalance enabling working outside of the legal framework to accomplish target outcomes. It turns an objective boolean evaluation (“is_citizen”) into a subjective one (“is_preferred_and_compliant”).

You might even hope that such a system would be able to work off of their name and some other memorable, identifiable information like address, origin country, date of birth, and would display their papers with photo-identification available, but alas...

The goal isn't to be reasonable or helpful.

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