Papers, Please: How Immigration Enforcement Creates a New Literacy Test for Latino Citizenship

Contemporary immigration enforcement has, in practice, inverted Fourth Amendment protections for Latino Americans, shifting the burden from the government's obligation to justify seizures to citizens perceived need to carry documentation to avoid detention. Drawing on a 2025 U.S. Senate investigation documenting 22 cases of citizen detention, this article argues that selectively imposed documentary demands function analogously to Jim Crow literacy tests: ostensibly neutral proof requirements administered discriminatorily to produce two-tiered citizenship. The historical parallel lies in requiring targeted citizens to establish an entitlement that others enjoy presumptively. In contemporary immigration enforcement, demands for proof of citizenship can serve as the mechanism through which ethnic targeting operates, requiring Latino citizens to repeatedly establish a status ordinarily presumed for others. The article argues that the Supreme Court's September 2025 stay in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo threatens to entrench this disparity by allowing combinations of race-correlated factors to support reasonable suspicion. It proposes reforms including strict enforcement of prohibitions on race-based stops, clear limits on documentation demands, prohibitions on repeat stops absent new grounds, and private rights of action for wrongfully detained citizens.