How to Hide Your Baby From the Government

Flying around the world at such a clip isn’t unusual for influencers. But LaHargoue says her children, although born in the US, travel without birth certificates or Social Security numbers. Her thinking is aligned with the sovereign citizen movement: an ever-expanding group of anti-government activists that, for almost half a century, have operated on the belief that they aren’t subject to US law. “Hot take: You don’t actually need a birth certificate to raise a thriving, traveling, fully functional child,” she writes in the same post. “Yeah … I said it. Because we are living proof of it.” By virtue of not registering her two young children’s births, she says her sons are “sovereign babies”—an oft-used hashtag, on accounts such as LaHargoue’s, to describe a child bearing alternative identification documents. With her brand Veda Revival, LaHargoue offers a white-glove concierge service to new and expecting parents, rooted in the belief that obtaining requisite birth documents is tantamount to entering one’s children into “the jurisdiction of the US corporation.” A larger sovereign citizen movement has existed in the US for decades, with its practitioners similarly eschewing traditional government documents; acts of protest can also include tax evasion, driving without a license, and in the case of Terry Nichols—domestic terrorism. But the rise of influencers selling an alternative means of obtaining a passport, and the idea that babies can be sovereign, represents a new, digitally native outgrowth of this ideology. For $497, LaHargoue sells a bundle that includes videos and templates for parents to obtain passports for their children based on “nationality” versus “citizenship,” with detailed instructions so they might respond confidently during “interactions with agents of the matrix.” Those seeking something more intensive can pay $997 for “hand-holding,” meaning that LaHargoue will personally guide them in navigating this divergent route. (LaHargoue declined WIRED’s request for an interview, citing the forthcoming birth of her third child.) LaHargoue, who says she has worked with over 1,000 parents to obtain passports for their sovereign babies, is one of a growing cohort of influencers working in the unregulated industry that’s now selling this self-taught knowledge. One “family legacy architect” named Minister Dionne, known for broadcasting missives to her 125,000 Instagram followers about how registering one’s child makes them “wards of the state,” offers “Status Correction FastTrack Bundles” for securing noncitizen national passports (for as much as $555). LaHargoue also offers an affiliate program for those who want to make a commission of 15 to 20 percent by successfully selling her sovereign baby services. It’s impossible to quantify how many sovereign babies currently live in the US, given their parents’ feelings about record-taking. (According to one oft-cited estimate, 100,000 to 300,000 people identify as sovereign citizens, although it's hard to know exactly because of the nature of the movement.) But Adam Bojak, a family law attorney in western New York who is currently on the ballot for the New York state legislature, says that he’s seen an uptick in cases involving sovereign children. In decades past, he’d have maybe one client per year who’d vacate or even try to reject formal identification documents for their children; lately, that’s increased to a half dozen a year, a phenomenon he suspects is linked to the “psychic break” that happened during Covid. “So many of these things are downstream from the aftereffects of that,” he says. “Just where people were ripped apart socially and physically from each other, emotionally. [It’s a rupture] that leads into this idea that everybody’s out for themselves.” Remote learning during the pandemic also transformed education. Homeschooling rates surged in the early 2020s and remain high: The National Home Education Research Institute estimated earlier this year that 3.4 million children in the US are homeschooled—a number that is almost certainly underreported—compared to 1.4 million back in 2003. Tess Ulrey, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, is unsurprised that the sovereign baby movement has risen in tandem with homeschooling rates, as homeschooling can become an inadvertent gateway into sovereign thinking. Some parents might pull their child out of school and “get tied up in this ideology of like, ‘Well, it is my right to do whatever I want. Well, why would the government be tracking that?’” she says. Indeed, peppered between posts name-checking Rumi and denouncing circumcision, LaHargoue encourages parents to reject conventional education systems. In her July appearance on the Born Free Method podcast, LaHargoue spoke about her belief that the US school system is connected to a larger government plot that, by virtue of the birth certificate, “contracts” children as human capital. “That school system is now teaching them how to be a good worker,” she said. “Let’s shuffle them right down this path.” A recent rise in “world schooling,” or rooting a child’s instruction in travel rather than curricula, is similarly linked with the sovereign baby movement. Jemila Moore, a doula based in South Carolina, lives nomadically with her partner and four young children. Her three youngest kids have neither birth certificates nor Social Security numbers. Moore, who swears by world schooling, wanted to ensure that her children had the ability to travel with passports. Wherever her family may be, Moore accompanies her children to local public libraries to read and do math exercises. “There's nothing greater than children being able to learn about other countries while actually witnessing those countries and their culture, and let those countries tell their history versus just reading it in a textbook,” she says. “I think that it really makes a difference on our development as people and how we view the world.” While sovereign babies are bred on the grounds of government suspicion, sovereign-minded parents still “want to travel under the banner of the United States of America without actually being subject to the United States of America,” says Bojak. “Like George Costanza said, ‘We’re living in a society,’ and these are the barriers you have to clear to live in a society.” Rob Finch, a North Carolina–based consultant who trains law enforcement officers to engage with sovereign citizens who don’t believe they are subject to the law, says this ideology is "not fact-based," adding: “You've got a lot of opportunistic people selling these packages of ‘Keep your kid off the grid, here's how you do it.’” Without clearing these barriers, experts worry that sovereign babies are far more likely to fall through societal cracks and live insular lives. Most will be unable to drive, find jobs, or even secure housing without the crucial documents one needs to move through the world.

To some sovereign citizens, it’s no coincidence that birth certificates became rote in the 1930s, the same decade FDR signed an executive order replacing gold as the backing standard for US currency. Proponents of the “straw man theory,” a central premise in sovereign ideology, hold that when parents take out a birth certificate and Social Security number for their child, the government then opens an account in their name and uses them, in the absence of gold, as human capital to back US debt. This bogus theory is often invoked by sovereign citizens who, say, get pulled over for driving without a license, as a way of justifying their actions: They believe that every individual has two separate personas—a legal entity that is bound by the government, and themselves—and that laws thus don’t apply to them as individuals. To date, no US court has ever sided with sovereign citizens invoking these arguments, says family law attorney Christopher C. Melcher: “There's no legal basis for what they're saying, but they say it with enough conviction and consistency that they hope they can get away with it.” The modern sovereign citizens movement has its roots in a hate-fueled paramilitary cohort called Posse Comitatus (Latin for “power of the county”). In the 1970s, an ex-Army lieutenant colonel turned “minister” named William Potter Gale founded the group, hinged on racist and antisemetic beliefs, in Southern California. Gale believed in a “citizen’s government” that would exact justice in its own way; throughout the decade, his followers violently detained and assaulted an IRS worker and attempted to “indict” a judge. When an agricultural crisis gripped the US, his conspiracy-driven ideas spread throughout the country. Posse Comitatus’ anti-government tactics, which include not paying taxes, later spread into a larger sovereign citizens’ movement, which now has dozens of different factions and chapters in various states. One such group is the American State Nationals, who align with sovereign citizen ideology but distance themselves from the moniker because of the movement’s white supremacist origins. ASNs believe one can obtain a noncitizen national passport that, by virtue of having a certain number of stars on it, gives them limited diplomatic immunity. Some even sell bundles on social media that allow people, for several hundred dollars, to exit their “contract” with the US government through a passport based on nationality rather than citizenship. Beyond a skepticism of the US government, the parents of sovereign babies are difficult to pin down. They typically do not align with any one political party or religious group. While some live more holistic and off-grid lifestyles, and an overlap does exist between sovereignty practitioners and ardent anti-vaxers, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that this is a strain of the Make America Healthy Again movement, either. Rather than having one centralized leader or a physical community, the sovereign baby phenomenon is more akin to a vast constellation, people connected by the belief that by applying for a birth certificate and Social Security number, they are “binding” their children with the “United States corporation,” as LaHargoue likes to put it. In a series of videos included in Veda Revival’s “Born Free Blueprint,” LaHargoue argues that sovereign babies are “ushering in a new era of freedom.” (These videos are free, but before purchasing and viewing LaHargoue’s more in-depth guides, all clients are required to upload a passport/ID and sign an agreement accepting the terms of entering her member community—which threatens legal action if one does not use her information with “integrity and benevolence.”) The US Department of State requires evidence of citizenship before approving a passport. If one doesn’t have a primary document (such as a birth certificate), the agency accepts several forms of secondary evidence, including a delayed birth certificate and a Letter of No Record—which must be issued by the state and include public record documents such as a hospital birth certificate, baptism records, school records, or a census record. Those hewing to sovereign thinking tend to go with another option: a family Bible containing written inscriptions denoting the births and deaths of relatives. Melcher says it’s difficult, but not impossible, for those born on US soil to obtain secondary evidence that’s “sufficient to convince the State Department to issue a passport, based on them claiming that they were born in a state or territory, without a birth certificate.” A woman living in Texas, whom I’ll call Deborah, purchased an instructional video from LaHargoue’s catalog and says she was able to obtain a passport for her infant—sans birth certificate—by submitting baptism records, a family Bible, an affidavit confirming that she had indeed given birth to him, and a formal announcement in a local newspaper announcing his birth. She notarized each of these documents and sent them certified through