For fellow Americans living in cities where ICE is active, many people, especially those of Hispanic descent, are already carrying around passports on their persons at all times because they’re rightfully afraid of being forcibly disappeared or deported to some random South American country.
A passport card can be obtained for $30 from the Department of State. It is considered exactly equivalent to a passport within the US, but it’s the size of a credit card. It is a valid travel document for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean. It also counts as a Real ID. The card is good for ten years.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-passport/card.html
Do not do this if you are transgender or have an X gender marker. They will cancel your passport and tell you to apply for a new one with your sex assigned at birth.
Everyone should get a passport. You never know if you ever need to travel in an emergency. In addition if Republicans do impose stricter voter ID laws you’ll be ready for it.
But I would very strongly recommend getting the larger passport in addition to the card because the card doesn’t let you do as much as the passport book.
Do not do this if you are transgender or have an X gender marker. They will cancel your passport and tell you to apply for a new one with your sex assigned at birth.
Uh . . . how? I’m a trans man, but my passport says male. I changed it years ago. I have an active passport. Is there anything in this process that would get me flagged as a trans person?
They have a database of trans people. If you were ever issued a passport with an F gender marker, they would know you changed it.
If you try to renew, you’ll get the passport back with two holes punched in it with a letter telling you to apply again with an F gender marker.
Edit: Some transgender people have been issued the passport anyway with the gender they were assigned at birth. This causes problems because your appearance would not match the gender stated on the passport and thus would subject you to additional scrutiny at checkpoints. That’s not even mentioning the countries where being transgender is just illegal, although I don’t imagine you have many plans to visit those places.
Fuckin’ gross.
So for every person who submits for a renewal or new passport, they are crosschecking records to try to catch “the trannies”.
Yeah, this is unfortunately why, immediately after the election, there was a surge of posts on Lemmy and elsewhere telling transgender people to rush a passport application or renewal while Biden was still in office. Basically within weeks of Trump assuming power, dealing with the federal government has been Hell on earth for transgender people.
It has indeed. I live in one of the most hostile states in the country. Working like hell to get the fuck out.
YSK a card in your wallet won’t help you much when an ICE agent points a gun at your head and tells you your passport looks fake, without even looking at it.
If this form factor for ID isn’t well known enough for them to know about it, I doubt they received training on its existence.
Which means having this card will make them assume it’s fake by default. “That’s not what a US passport looks like!” Thereby increasing their deluded suspicions, rather than reducing them.
I doubt they received training
on its existence.The problem is not lack of training. This isn’t a “whoopsie-poopsie”. They’re doing it on purpose and if someone looks brown enough they get kidnapped. With luck they get released later.
They already did this to people with Real ID drivers licenses, which have the same requirements to acquire as a passport.
The main advantage is that it’s a redundant form of citizenship ID. ICE can always say it is fake and confiscate it, but then you have your passport book waiting at home for your lawyer to take to the detention center to get you out (once they find out where they took you).
Most Americans don’t own a passport in the first place.
Anyone who fails the “Peter Griffin in a Fez” test needs to get one. And double up on the card and book.
Because it doesn’t matter where you were born, or what the facts are. ICE is targeting people who they believe don’t belong here, based on how they look and sound. Having the card on your person is no guarantee, but maybe it will work if they are in a good mood.
It’s sad that this is what it has come to in America, of all places, but here we are.
Why would they let your lawyer find out where they took you?
Yeah, but you’re at least a little more likely to survive.
Apparently they don’t even bother with that now, they’ll go after anyone
Are you actively encouraging people to not seek protections against a fascist regime just because it wouldn’t be 100% effective?
Maybe armbands with star of david would help like it did during Nazi regime?
Ah, so you are trying to get people killed.
Yes, because we all know citizens don’t get shot in the face while driving and just existing. Identification would really help. We’re way past the compliance stage.
Still doing the or nothing argument. ICE has actively deported us citizens. These people might have had a better chance of arguing at the moment if they’d had this identification. Are you also arguing against vaccines because they don’t make you bulletproof?
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How in the world did you draw that conclusion? I’m merely pointing out that they’re discriminating on skin color alone, but that wasn’t an advocacy against a passport card.
Lmao it’s been shown multiple times that even with a passport shown to ICE they’ll just call it fake if they want to abduct you.
Yup I was going to comment the same. The physical passport might be useful after the fact once you’re in ICE holding being processed after x amount of hours/days. But then again at that point they would look you up in their systems so having the physical passport in your wallet may end up being a waste of time anyway.
The fact is if the ICE goon squad you encounter feels like arresting and detaining US citizens they’re going to do it.
And that’s assuming the ICE goons don’t make up charges of assaulting them or similar, in which case I’m not sure if those US citizens being charged get released with a future court date or are detained indefinitely.
It would’ve been amazing if most of the US had come together, did a general strike, or another massive daily protest like BLM to tell this regime to fuck the fuck off. But instead we step piecemeal closer and closer to something worse. If we didn’t resist on Step C, then on to Step D they go.
This is actually not super common. I was personally stopped by them and I was let go after showing my passport card. Ideally, ICE should not be arresting any citizens, but it happens anyway because they’ll hire anyone who can breathe and do a decent seig heil. Nonetheless, a thing that works 80% of the time is still worth having.
Edit: I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.
It is happening all day, every day. Your one experience is your one experience. You are denying the experiences of, right now, countless others. Every response you have is, “but when it happened to me.” Cool. It might be different for Americans with Somali heritage in MN right now than it was for Americans with Asian heritage weeks ago in Portland. You are telling a whole group of people to deny their eyes, ears, and rational thought because you had an encounter with one agent on one day.
I appreciate the sentiment of your post, people need to protect themselves and the people around them however they can. But stop this nonsense about how it’s “80%” going to get you out of being beaten and taken to the Whipple building. That’s a number you absolutely made up and keep repeating like it has any validity whatsoever.
Look, I came into this expecting people to understand that most (arbitrary percentage greater than 50 but less than 100) interactions with anyone, ICE or not, are reasonable. You don’t hear about these, because they’re not interesting enough to get posted on the Internet. If your information comes from the Internet only, you will think everything is extreme. I don’t like to use the term “terminally online”, but it’s a problem common with people typically described as being “terminally online”—not realising that real life is a lot more boring than it would appear from clips that people share of ridiculous interactions.
It’s always difficult to deal with these types of comments because despite it being obvious that they show an extremity bias because the person who made them has a viewpoint influence by an extremely cherry-picked data set, they technically are logically sound.
Edit: I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.
You should know that you are not required to identify yourself to the gestapo. This post is in un-American.
The way to combat these idiots is everyone refusing to show identification .
Thank you. Papers, Please isn’t the ending we need to run to. They can’t treat us like criminals cause they feel like it
I thought that you did within 100m of an airport
Metes not miles
While I agree with the sentiment behind your post, this is like waving a copy of the Weimar constitution to the Gestapo.
i dont get what anyone’s so worried about, as a straight white man cops don’t seem to give me any trouble when i present my papers
Still seems like a hassle to have to pull that out. They should design something that’s more outwardly noticeable like a piece of clothing or maybe just a simple armband they can wear over their clothes that signifies they’re jewis-I mean legal or whatever.
Or just a stamp saying ‘this person is unwanted but haven’t found a reason to get rid of them yet’ so you can show to the next ice ‘agent’ you’ve already been harassed earlier.
Or maybe a tattoo on their forehead!
Apple has been trying to get states/governments to let them add their ID to Apple Wallet for years now. Only a handful of states have complied. I’m not sure if you can add a passport.
The most common misconception is that a cop will take your phone and have access to all your personal information plus they’re in your phone. That’s not how it’s intended to work (but absolutely can regardless of whether your state supports digital ID). The intended use is much like paying for goods, they hold up a reader, you open Wallet and select your ID, tap your phone to their reader, and they can see all the relevant information. And it’s encrypted and all that.
Of course, I’m talking about cops following procedure, not thugs working directly for Trump.
I would advise never using your phone. That just cant end well.
Your phone should never be involved in your interactions with cops. In fact you should literally shut it down to get it in its totally encrypted and hard locked state
I agree. I just mean, in theory, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
If I had state ID on my phone and a cop asked for it with the reader, sure, I’ll do it. He wants the phone, I’m squeezing the side button five times to lock it so Face ID is disabled. That also prevents data access via the USB port until it’s unlocked. And oops, I forgot the passcode. Can’t prove I know it, I just use Face ID.
Ur better off just shutting it down. As long as it is still is AFU (after first unlock) theres all kinds of fuckery they can work with. It has to be ahard shutdown or reset
My goodness. I can’t believe we are living in this era of fascism.
Good luck United States folk.
“YSK you should comply with authoritarian governments”
Yall are so fucking cooked.
Watch the comments advocating for resisting the fascist takeover and see the excuses and downvotes pour in.
So cooked.
“You Americans all are cowards for not doing anything against the fascists besides protesting!”
“okay what do you suggest?”
“I’m not gonna say! But you 2nd amendment people should definitely think of something”
“dude I’m not going to travel 1000 miles and shoot the most protected person on the planet”
“woah where did I say that? Americans are so violent and uncreative! you have to do something along the lines of the French revolution though”
This same conversation repeated over and over with the same bad faith assholes every day. It gets so very tiring to read.
Fucking stewed.
YSK if ICE thinks you’re too brown, they’ll just say yours is fake and deport you anyway. It’s already happened to US citizens.
Deadset. Which moron actually thinks mexican-looking peoples with actual passports are being approached on the streets and let go??
Source on this please!
Thank you so much!
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YSK, you don’t need a fucking passport to be safe in this country. FUCK ICE AND RESIST
Papers please
Or wear a star on your jacket for everyone to see.
“Ihre Papiere, bitte.”
If you have to prove you have rights then no one has rights.
Ysk papers please within boarders is a regime in turmoil.
A REAL ID is also valid proof of citizenship. ICE clearly does not care.
You’re incorrect on that https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2026/01/05/real-id-travel-immigration-status/88032182007/
All this tells you is that ICE indeed does not care.
REAL IDs are not proof of citizenship. They’re proof that you had legal status at the time of their issue.
You’re trolling right? No one should need to unlawfully identify themselves at the bequest of nazis.
What should be is not the same as what is.
What IS is that they don’t care about little pieces of paper in your wallet.
I got checked by ICE in Portland and they let me go when I gave them my passport card. Of course, it really does depend on whether you got an agent with an IQ of 90 or an IQ of 70. But it doesn’t hurt to have one.
Don’t comply
This is a difficult thing to respond to. I (Asian, US citizen) have actually been stopped by ICE because I live in Portland, Oregon. I gave them my passport card and they said, “okay, you can go”. I then cussed them out, saying “You blind motherfuckers, you aren’t even good at being racist; do I look Mexican to you?”
They told me to fuck off. And I did, after giving them the middle finger and calling them “fucking Blackshirts”. But this interaction accomplished what I wanted it to: it (1) caused aggravation, (2) shows them that they aren’t welcome and (3) that their presence is not appreciated. In hindsight, I should have stayed and argued to waste their time.
If I had just refused to do anything the whole time, the most likely outcome was that I would have been taken to the ICE facility in downtown Portland and accosted for a few hours, accomplishing nothing.
Well, if there are going to be consequences, I guess you have no choice but to comply.
Grandad is rolling over in his grave right now.
“You blind motherfuckers, you aren’t even good at being racist; do I look Mexican to you?”
Right… because it was only a problem because you’re Asian… the stop would have been fine if you were actually Mexican… gee thanks.
You must understand, that the goal of saying that was to cause aggravation. Had I been Mexican I would have chosen a different insult.
Should is a funny word
