Garrison Davis

In fact, it's federal policy to create such discrepancies.

Furthermore, dealing with potential discrepancies between gender markers on foreign documents and the Trump admin's insistence on only using biological sex at birth on federal documents is handled by State Department consular officers and USCIS employees, not ICE enforcement and removal operations officers who work under an entirely different agency.

But the main thing that makes me believe that ICE will not suddenly start targeting people for being trans is that this State Department policy requiring sex at birth on visa applications isn't actually new.

It's existed in some form since February 2025 for both immigrant and non-immigrant visas.

The only recent change is that the green card lottery rules have been updated to use the same language.

Nothing about this new rule makes it more or less likely that ICE will be free to scrutinize trans people's documents and detain those whose documents show any inconsistencies, affirmed ACLU staff attorney Melita Picasso.

Put plainly, State Department restrictions on stating assigned sex at birth on green card or visa applications does not give ICE any new justification to roam around disappearing random people who quote-unquote look trans.

But it could make border crossings more risky for non-citizens and visa applications harder to navigate and subject to delays.

This policy from the State Department is bad, but turning that into saying that ICE is now going to round up trans people and v-code them doesn't understand how this will actually affect immigrant trans people or trans people currently in federal custody.

Side note, v-coding refers to the systematic enabling of sexual abuse towards incarcerated trans women to please male prisoners.

Near the end of the Substack article, the author suggests that trans people in Kansas could be at extra risk of getting detained by ICE because of a new law invalidating driver's license and birth certificates with amended gender markers, possibly leaving some US citizens temporarily unable to prove citizenship with a valid birth certificate.

This new law is certainly dangerous, and any attempt to strip away people's legal ID is very worrying and carries potential for abuse.

In the case of Kansas, already having a passport would be really ideal.

Otherwise, a hospital birth certificate or early school records can theoretically be used to help prove citizenship.

And it is worth saying that a citizen temporarily losing documentation does not put them at the same level of marginalized risk as an undocumented immigrant.

The new Kansas law does direct the Office of Vital Statistics to quote, reissue birth certificates when necessary to correct the sex identification, unquote.

Similarly, DMVs were instructed to reissue a quote-unquote corrected license once the invalidated one was turned in.

We'll be right back after these messages.

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here.

The unsubstantiated claims made in that Substack article went viral across multiple social media platforms like TikTok, Blue Sky, and Twitter, bolstering further speculation.