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Wired: influencers sell courses on skipping U.S. birth records for infants
Wired reports that social-media coaches are selling paid kits that instruct parents not to file birth certificates or Social Security numbers for newborns, then seek passports with secondary papers.
- New headline Was: “How to Hide Your Baby From the Government”
- Our desk filed its story
Wired reported Tuesday that Instagram coaches aligned with sovereign-citizen ideas are selling paid courses that tell new and expecting parents not to file U.S. birth certificates or Social Security numbers for their children, then to seek passports using other paperwork1.
The magazine focused on Kristin LaHargoue of central Utah, who posts family travel to more than 88,000 Instagram followers under Veda Revival and says her U.S.-born sons have neither document1. She sells a $497 bundle of videos and templates aimed at passports based on nationality rather than citizenship, and a $997 option in which she personally guides clients, Wired said1. LaHargoue declined the magazine's interview request1.
Wired placed the trend in a decades-old sovereign-citizen movement that rejects many government records and, in some cases, taxes or driver's licenses1. The magazine said an often-cited estimate puts 100,000 to 300,000 people in that milieu, while noting the figure is hard to verify1. Another Instagram figure, Minister Dionne, with about 125,000 followers, sells Status Correction bundles for noncitizen-national passports, according to the report1.
U.S. State Department rules still require evidence of citizenship for a passport1. If a primary birth certificate is missing, Wired said the agency can accept secondary evidence such as delayed certificates, a state letter of no record, hospital or baptism records, school or census records1. A Texas parent, identified only as Deborah, told Wired she used baptism records, a family Bible, an affidavit and a newspaper birth notice after buying LaHargoue's video, and later received a passport1.
Adam Bojak, a western New York family lawyer, told Wired he has seen more cases involving children without standard IDs1. Consultants who train police and homeschooling advocates quoted in the piece said children raised this way can later have trouble driving, working or renting housing1. The National Home Education Research Institute estimated 3.4 million U.S. children are homeschooled, Wired reported, citing that growth as one backdrop1.
Sarah Ashley Townsend of Maryland, who was not given a Social Security number as a child, described being mocked at school, denied a driver's license as a teenager, and then facing delays when her own son's birth certificate was processed, Wired reported1. Other parents in the story, including a South Carolina doula and a Hawaii farmer, described free or home births and online groups as the path into skipping paperwork1.
Wired said free births were 1.5 percent of U.S. births in 2024, triple the 2004 share, and that medical experts warn unassisted birth can raise the risk of complications1. The magazine traced older sovereign-citizen ideology to 1970s Posse Comitatus organizing and to claims that birth certificates create a government financial account in a child's name, a theory it presented as belief, not fact1.
