🚨 Afraid for Their Lives - Children Are Now WEARING Passports to School in America

Why families are wearing passports around their necks—and what history tells us comes next.

Photo by Liam James Doyle for The New York Times

I need you to sit with an image that should never exist in the United States.

An eight-year-old and a fifteen-year-old in a Minneapolis suburb are sent to school with their American passports hanging from lanyards around their necks. Not in a folder. Not in a backpack. Around their necks—so that if armed federal agents stop them, they won’t have to reach for a pocket and risk being harmed. To sum it all up, it’s because they aren’t white.

“I don’t like it,” the younger child said. “I really don’t like it.”

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Now let’s talk plainly about what is happening.

In the past two months, federal immigration agents have swept through the Twin Cities, arresting anybody they feel like —citizens, asylum-seekers, refugees, undocumented people. ICE has killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Agents are stopping people seemingly at random and asking one question that has echoed through some of the darkest chapters of human history:

“Where were you born?”

This is not a rhetorical question. It is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a sorting mechanism.

For many Minnesotans, the answer to a question that used to sound absurd in America—Is it safe to leave home without proof of citizenship?—has become a hard yes. A 75-year-old veteran who fought alongside U.S. forces in Vietnam now tapes his passport and driver’s license to the outside of his clothing. A state senator carries her passport everywhere. The mayor of St. Paul does too. Families cancel international trips for fear that officials will seize their papers. People try to travel only with white friends, or with children who “look more racially ambiguous.”

“This is our real life now,” one woman said, her voice breaking.

This is what a show-me-your-papers nation looks like at birth.

And we need to be clear about something before anyone tries to launder this into language about “law and order” or “enforcement.” Papers do not exist to protect people. Papers exist to rank people. They always have.

Every system that has ever required certain groups to carry proof of permission to exist has told the same lie at the beginning: This is temporary. This is targeted. This is for safety. And every one of those systems has ended the same way—with terror normalized, with cruelty routinized, with entire populations living one interaction away from hell.

Apartheid South Africa didn’t begin with mass graves. It began with pass books. Black South Africans were required to carry documents at all times, proving where they were allowed to be, when, and for how long. Failure to produce papers meant detention, violence, or worse. The cruelty was bureaucratic first. Efficient. Clean on paper. The terror came later.

The American South knew this well. Enslaved people were required to carry passes signed by white authorities to move beyond plantations. After slavery, Jim Crow laws revived the logic—Black bodies policed, stopped, questioned, and punished for existing without approval. Slave patrols did not ask philosophical questions about freedom. They asked to see papers.

Nazi Germany’s internal papers regime did not begin with camps. It began with identification, registration, classification—deciding who belonged and who did not. Colonial regimes across Africa and Asia perfected the same playbook. Palestinians have lived under it for decades—IDs that determine whether you may travel, work, visit family, or survive a checkpoint. Your name, your birthplace, your accent, your address—your entire life reduced to a document that can be revoked.

And now, in the United States of America, children wear passports around their necks to school.

Let’s talk about the lie embedded in the reassurance being offered. In a September 2025 SCOTUS decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave ICE increased discretion to detain people based on factors that include race and ethnicity, writing that those wrongly detained “may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens.” The Times reports that these “Kavanaugh stops” have become ubiquitous.

Read that again. “May promptly go free.” As if the harm is not the detention itself. As if being dragged from your home in freezing temperatures in your underwear—as happened to a naturalized U.S. citizen in Minnesota—doesn’t leave trauma even when you’re “released hours later, without explanation or apology.” As if being forced to prove your humanity at gunpoint is a clerical inconvenience. I think in generations that come this notorious and racist Supreme Court decision is going to be a historic one that law students and scholars debate because of all the harm it has caused and will continue to cause.

This is the psychology of domination. It teaches people to calculate risk at every step: Do I assert my rights and risk being taken anyway? Or do I comply and hope that obedience buys safety? Parents now have to teach their children how to survive encounters with the state. Not how to thrive. Not how to belong. How to survive.

One mother told The Times she had to invent a new parenting routine—slipping passports onto lanyards before her children leave for school. “This is just one of those things that was not in the parenting books,” she said. Her younger child put it perfectly: “I have a passport, but it’s paper, not a shield.”

That sentence should stop us cold.

And for my Muslim readers—and for anybody who claims faith means anything in public life—this is exactly the kind of moment the Qur’an speaks to when Allah commands: “Stand firm for justice, as witnesses for Allah, even if it is against yourselves or parents and relatives.” (Qur’an 4:135). Justice isn’t justice when it’s convenient. It isn’t justice when it benefits the powerful. It is justice precisely when the vulnerable are being hunted and everyone else is being tempted to look away.

Now, I need to say something that many people will find uncomfortable, but it must be said with honesty: Gaza did not cause this - of course. But the genocide in Gaza absolutely normalized the kind of cruelty and violence we are seeing right now.

For more than two years—two and a half now—hundreds of millions of us have watched Palestinians be treated as people without rights. We have watched tens of thousands rounded up and jailed without cause. We have watched families bombed, elders humiliated, children killed. We have watched ID systems and checkpoints and mass detentions explained away as “security.” We have watched international law shredded in daylight. And we have watched much of the world—especially in the West—learn how to look away. In some ways, we all do. We have to go on about our day - knowing full well that sheer evil is underway in Gaza, in Sudan, and in so many other places.

When a government demonstrates that it can subject an entire population to endless surveillance, collective punishment, and arbitrary detention over there, the moral barrier to doing a lesser version over here collapses. Cruelty becomes portable. The logic travels. What once felt unthinkable starts to feel administratively reasonable.

This is how empire works. It practices abroad and imports the methods home.

And let’s be clear: what is happening in Minnesota is not an aberration. It is a warning flare. Once a state teaches itself that certain bodies are always suspect—that belonging is conditional, revocable, and racially coded—the circle of who must carry papers only expands. Today it is immigrants and people who “don’t look white.” History tells us it never stops there.

I know some readers will want to insist that this is about immigration policy, not oppression. That argument collapses the moment citizens are being stopped, detained, and killed. It collapses the moment children born in this country are told—implicitly and explicitly—that their Americanness must be proven at all times. It collapses the moment mayors and state senators feel compelled to carry passports like talismans.

This is not about enforcing borders. This is about who is presumed to belong and who must perform belonging on demand.

And here is the most dangerous part of all: systems like this do not require mass public support to function. They require only public resignation. They thrive when people say, This doesn’t affect me, or This is unfortunate but necessary, or Surely it won’t get worse. Every pass-law regime in history counted on that silence.

In the most famous hadith (a verified saying of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him) on this, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or is oppressed.” The companions asked, “O Messenger of Allah, we help the oppressed, but how do we help the oppressor?” He replied: “By preventing him from oppressing.”

That is what this moment demands: not vibes, not slogans, not performative outrage, but real prevention—real resistance to a state that is training itself to treat entire communities as permanently suspicious.

I am angry because I know this story. I recognize it. I have read it in history books and watched it unfold in real time across the globe. And I am outraged because the United States is now teaching its children—some children—that citizenship is not a right but a document you must display to stay alive.

If you are white and American-born and this still feels abstract to you, I need you to hear this: the measure of a society is not how it treats the most protected among us, but how quickly it is willing to terrorize the least protected. When papers become the price of safety, freedom has already begun to rot.

This is a clarion moment. Not because it is unprecedented—but because it is recognizable. We know exactly where this road leads. We have seen it before, in different uniforms, different languages, different centuries. And every time, people later ask the same question: When did it start?

It starts here. With lanyards. With “may promptly go free.” With paper held out like a shield.

We do not have the luxury of pretending otherwise.

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Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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