A Foreign ID, a Library Card, and a Phone Bill: The Paperwork Behind the Birth Tourism Boom

Texas accepts an ID from a database you can download off the dark web.

Rep. Brian Harrison found the next chapter of the Have My Baby In Texas saga on a state advertisement: the Texas health department accepts foreign IDs from anyone picking up a birth certificate.

Here’s the actual rule. One U.S. photo ID gets you the document. Don’t have one? All you need are two items from the state's B list. The B list is the junk drawer of identification; expired licenses, work badges, Medicaid cards. And, filed right alongside them, the identity documents of three foreign governments.

Taking them one at a time:

The El Salvadoran DUI

In 2024, a hacker dumped El Salvador’s ID database on the dark web: 5.1 million high-definition headshots, each indexed to its ID number. Eighty percent of the country, likely every adult, downloadable for free. Texas accepts it.

The Mexican voter registration card

Under Texas’s voter ID law, this ID won’t get you a ballot at any polling place in the state. But it will get you the foundational document of American citizenship.

I assume these ID’s are readily available on the black market. Of course, nobody would dare use the humble act of voting as a pretext to instigate fraud. We know this because Democrats said it’s true.

Nevertheless, here is one of these ID’s I found on a Dallas street a few years ago. I snapped this photo.

So no, they are not technically falling from the sky. They are, however, lying on the ground, waiting to become someone’s supporting documents.

The Honduran consular certifications

A consular ID is what a foreign government issues its citizens abroad when they lack any documents (lol). A 2004 GAO review of the whole thing found no standardized process, no verification database, and underlying paperwork checked by eyeball. The consulate is essentially a laminating service: a birth certificate nobody verified goes in, a photo ID Texas accepts comes out. The photo proves you are the person who handed over the paperwork. It says nothing about whether the paperwork is true.

Of course it gets worse. In 2014, Honduras suspended eight of its ten consuls in the United States, including Dallas and Houston, for illegally issuing identity documents, reportedly at $50 apiece. Honduras's own foreign ministry announced that consular identity documents issued in the U.S. "are not proof that a person is a Honduran citizen." Read that again. The government that issues the document disavowed it and Texas still takes it!

No one downstream in the US verifies the underlying document, either. Federal rules require that a foreign birth certificate come with a certified English translation, and the certification attests to exactly one thing: that the English matches the Spanish. A $30 online service will produce one in 24 hours. The requirement is that the document be readable, not that it be real.

The FBI told Congress in 2003 that the Mexican version of this document “is not a reliable form of identification” and that it lets a person build “a well-documented, but fictitious, identity in the United States.” The FBI official who delivered that warning was Steve McCraw. Texas then hired him to run DPS for the next 15 years so it would seem that the State is aware of these issues, you would think.

Only have one of these highly sus documents and need a birth US certificate for your anchor baby? The state will issue it with two “supporting documents.”

From the official list: a library card. A fishing license. A cell phone bill.

None of this is a law the Legislature passed, apparently. It’s Rule 181.28, an agency rule that, incidentally, requires every ID to be “verifiable by the source that issued the document.” Call the registry in San Salvador and let us know how that goes. The library-card list is even funnier: it isn’t in the rule at all, just agency “policy. A webpage. Maintained by the same health agency Abbott just ordered to “immediately” investigate birth tourism. Could it be true that fixing some of this can happen sooner rather than later? A new law will take hundreds of days without a special session. Webpages have an edit button.

Abbott ordered HHSC to launch an investigation into this. Current Revolt is already finished. You can thank us by subscribing.

---