At first blush, Kristin LaHargoue’s social media resembles that of many thirtysomething moms espousing aspirational lifestyles. To her 88,000-plus followers on Instagram, LaHargoue—a crunchy blonde living in central Utah—routinely posts her children, her husband, and herself traipsing around the globe on her account @veda.revival. There they are, standing before the Sagrada Familia, striking silly poses on a busy Tokyo street, or dancing beachside in the Philippines. In an April 2026 post soundtracked to a version of Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” LaHargoue wrote that she and her family have thus far traveled to over 40 countries.
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.
Birth certificates and Social Security numbers represent a relatively new standard for identification in the US. During the colonial period, American churches primarily kept birth records. But when millions of Europeans immigrated to the States in the 19th century, reformers became concerned about rising poverty rates, overpopulation, and the spread of epidemics in densely populated urban areas. In a bid to better understand public health, the US Census Bureau developed standardized certificates and began tracking births, though not every state followed suit. The process became more nationally standardized around the 1930s, and firmly de rigueur during World War II, when some factories would only employ US citizens as part of the war effort.
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 the mail. After an extensive back and forth, she said the office eventually approved the passport. “I opted for the passport route because that is a way of announcing, ‘Hey, I have this child,’” she says. “I'm claiming parental rights and backing them with the paperwork they'll need to make whatever choices they want in the future.”
In recent years, parents have stumbled into the sovereign baby movement through online rabbit holes, especially on Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, and Reddit. The confluence of factors that has given way to the sovereign baby movement—including the ubiquity of influencers, the isolating aftermath of Covid, skepticism of the medical establishment, and waning trust in the government—feels utterly of this time. Yet this phenomenon clashes against another tension: the Trump administration’s brutality toward immigrants and visible show of deporting people out of the US. At a moment when undocumented immigrants, green card holders, asylum seekers, and citizens are being shuttled to remote countries with little legal recourse, it’s striking that parents of sovereign children—of babies born in the US—have consciously stacked the odds against themselves and their kids.
“We shouldn't discount the fact that there's a guy in the Oval Office now, for the second time, who doesn't believe any rules pertain to him, and he's actually proven that over and over again that he doesn't have to follow laws,” Bojak, the attorney, says. “He doesn't have to follow court orders. And so if he doesn't, why the hell should any of the rest of us?”
Others arrive in other ways entirely: Deborah learned about sovereign citizen ideology—and later declined to get her toddler a birth certificate—after she’d accrued over $2,000 in speeding tickets. (She rejects the term "sovereign citizen” and claims it’s a slur; instead, she prefers to say she is "maximizing potential freedom” for her child.) “I ended up doing this deep dive from just having, honestly, a totally delusional idea of, ‘I'm not gonna pay these,’” she says. Some, like Zoe Durant, got here through in-person conversations with a doula, a midwife, or another professional birth attendant who usually helps new parents complete standard paperwork.
In 2016, while studying engineering in college, Durant was working as a bottle server and promotional model in Nevada. Several months after giving birth to her first child that same year, Durant and her partner traded the neon gleam of casinos for an offgrid solar farm mere miles away from Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. She’s a “first-generation farmer” of grapefruits, bananas, lilikoi, and lychee crops in the remote Hawaiian jungle, posting dispatches on Instagram under the name @junglefairyfarm. (They have since moved to a less harsh location).
Early into building their Big Island home, in 2021, Durant found out she was pregnant with her second child. When she learned that her partner couldn’t accompany her to requisite appointments because of Covid, Durant eschewed a hospital birth altogether. Instead, she found a midwife who helped deliver her daughter in a birthing pool at home. When it was time to consider her newborn’s birth certificate and Social Security number application, Durant consulted her midwife. “She was like, ‘Well, there's families that I work with who don't do that,’” Durant says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, tell me more.’”
The midwife, Durant explained, told her that she’d helped several parents who identified as sovereign. Intrigued, and recalling how she’d felt pushed to sign these papers after her first child’s hospital birth, Durant chewed over the alternative the midwife had told her about. “It seems like something that [my daughter] could do later on if she wanted to consent to that, and it also helps protect her identity,” Durant reasoned. “In the future, she's not going to worry about someone stealing her Social Security number. And honestly, the way the economy is, I don't even know if Social Security is going to be around when she's old enough.”
But Durant worried that without documents like a birth certificate and a Social Security card, her child might run into hurdles if she wished to live a normal life. Durant instead applied for a passport for her daughter, submitting various secondary documents. At one point, Durant says, a passport agent told her that the office couldn’t grant her the document because she didn’t have hard proof of her child’s birth. Durant then sent the official a photo of herself sitting in the shallow birthing pool with her newborn, telling them, “This is the only evidence I have of the birth—because it was a sovereign birth.” These are “my beliefs,” she added, “sorry if you don’t like it.” She says the birth photo worked, and the passport office eventually sent the document along; all told, it took about six months.
Last year, Durant wrote and self-published a book, Opting Out: A Parent's Guide to a Barcode-Free Birth and Keeping Your Child Off the Grid: How to Protect Your Child's Identity and Secure Their Future Outside the State’s System. At a little under $20 per copy, it’s not the main source of the content creator/model’s income—she’s sold a few hundred copies thus far, she estimates—but Durant says that’s secondary to how “passionate” she feels about the subject. “I think a lot of parents are just trying to take back power because the government is getting a little bit overzealous with their control,” she says. One chapter of Durant’s book is dedicated solely to dealing with Child Protective Services, should the agency inquire about why one’s child does not have a birth certificate. In it, she writes: “Take a deep breath. Stand your ground. You have done your research. They were not taking your child. In that moment you realized something. The birth certificate was not just paperwork. It is permission, permission for the government to track you. To control you and intervene in your family's life whenever they see fit.”
Durant’s beliefs diverge from the mainstream sovereign baby movement, which is intertwined with free birthing—a separate, largely influencer-led movement that advocates for giving birth without medical intervention. In 2024, 1.5 percent of births in the US were free births, a number that tripled from 2004. (Durant had assistance during her home birth and believes in seeking out traditional medicine for “life-saving care”; she has been undergoing chemotherapy for a stage IV colon cancer diagnosis.) Free birthers can also opt out of prenatal care altogether, in what’s known as a “wild pregnancy.” LaHargoue, a vocal proponent of the Free Birth movement, has posted about her appearance on the Free Birth Society Podcast alongside Reels about traveling without these documents.
Marisse Vista, 34, first learned about sovereignty during the pandemic, when she was newly single and pregnant. She felt alone, save for an online “village of women” whom Vista credits with helping her “unearth a lot of things that didn't align with what I had known to be true.” After one woman told her that she believed “the birth certificate was a [government] bond,” Vista began questioning other “mainstream things,” like vaccinating her children. When Vista became pregnant with her second child, she decided to free-birth at an Airbnb after “binging” the FBS podcasts. After she decided not to obtain traditional birth documents for her infant, she started poking around online to find alternate routes to getting a passport.
By that point, Vista, a first-generation Filipina who grew up in Spring, Texas, had launched a Facebook community for like-minded sovereign mothers. When Vista mentioned in the group that she’d been trying to get her head around the alternative passport process, someone brought up Veda’s name. Vista bought LaHargoue’s step-by-step course to ensure that she had the requisite documents before going to the passport office in Waco. LaHargoue became her “echo chamber to make sure that I was doing it like fully right, because I had done all this research alone,” Vista says. “It was just a confirmation that, like, all my research was correct.”
When she became pregnant with her third child, Vista had “a pain-free, orgasmic, Frank breech free birth,” meaning that the baby emerges from the birth canal buttocks-first. The experience led Vista to help people conceive their “spirit babies” and birth them as sovereign parents. Under the banner of her brand La Souveraine Mere, her services range from a digital guide to “understanding how spirit babies communicate, what they need energetically before they can land, and how to align your womb space with their frequency” ($44) to a “Sovereign Conception Program” that includes “Spinal Energetics, frequency work, ancestral clearing, and womb activation woven into a container that treats your body as the oracle it already is” ($5,555).
Once these expectant parents get into Vista’s “world,” as she describes, “then I start to talk about, like, ‘Once you have the baby, what are you going to do? You're going to steward them. You're going to make sure that … their custodian isn't the government,’ and so we then talk about birth certificates and Social Security numbers.”
A bone-deep distrust of the medical establishment—and, in some cases, traumatic experiences—is another common gateway into free-birthing and, then, the sovereign baby movement. Moore, the former nursing assistant who studied public health in college, says she wasn’t expecting to feel “very pressured” to get an induction until she went into labor at a hospital. “When I was like, ‘Hey, since I'm already contracting, can we not do the induction? Can I just let my body go naturally?’” she says. “They're like, ‘Well, the doctor put the order in. We're just gonna do it.’” In hindsight, Moore wishes she had "advocated for herself more” in that moment. “My body was probably already doing what was necessary for me, and the induction just made my labor process a little bit more challenging than what it is actually with the natural flow.” Moore says it caused her to reflect on the disparities that women of color face when delivering children, and later informed her decision to free-birth her other kids.
There is an indisputable maternal health crisis in this country, and especially among women of color. But experts warn that free-birthing carries a heightened risk of complications, and the practice has come under intense scrutiny after infants and parents alike have died from the complications of unassisted birth. Sovereign baby influencers may risk further sowing distrust by advocating for risky, radical procedures without any prenatal care or medical professionals—particularly to those who might already be more vulnerable—by alleging that physicians are cogs in a bigger birth-certificate conspiracy. “They’ve tricked us into hiring licensed providers,” LaHargoue says in a video titled “Who’s Child Is It Really? The Truth About Birth Certificates & Legal Fiction.” “They’ve tricked us into believing that birth is even a medical event.”
“I’ve been saving this cigarette,” Sarah Ashley Townsend tells me over Zoom one June afternoon. She’s sitting in her home in Maryland, near the Susquehanna River. The windows are open. “I think that’s the hardest part to talk about,” the 43-year-old says, lighting the end of the smoke. Townsend is referring to the moment she became aware that she’d been raised differently.
Shortly before her birth, Townsend’s mother tumbled down the sovereign-ideology-aligned rabbit hole via a neighbor, who convinced her to not give birth at a hospital and to refuse paperwork. “I was not given a Social Security number, because she was going to do this all outside the boundaries of society now,” Townsend says. Vaccines were verboten, and she and her siblings lived consciously isolated from others in their community.
When her father’s family intervened and lobbied to send Townsend to school, the 5-year-old walked into kindergarten “thinking that I started school with everyone else, and I did not,” she says, her voice breaking. “I thought it was the first day of school, and apparently it was the last month of school. They made fun of me because I couldn't tie my shoes … and they all asked if I was from another planet.” Townsend’s mother would pack her inappropriate lunches or fight over signing papers that would have allowed her child to buy a meal: “She didn’t want me to have their tainted food,” she says. “She would blame us for subscribing to their system, because she didn't think we should have to be there anyway.”
Townsend considers herself fortunate that her father, while distant, advocated for her. One day he showed up at Townsend’s elementary school, and the pair walked to a medical clinic; he quietly ensured that she received vaccinations without her mother knowing. After her parents divorced, Townsend’s mother moved her and her sister around constantly, choosing off-grid places where they sometimes lived without power for months. Townsend’s father would ship her boxes with plushies and gift cards hidden inside, which she would use to buy clothes. Her dad would tuck novels into these packages with words underlined, a secret code telling her she was loved, and that she needed to stay strong.
When Townsend was 16, she tried to apply for a driver’s license and was repeatedly denied on account of her inconsistent birth and medical history. She approached her music and theater teachers for help: “How do I be an adult … how do I go do things I'm supposed to do?” she remembers asking them.
She believed she had her documents straightened out by the time she turned 18. But Townsend kept running into hurdles when she tried to join her husband’s health insurance shortly afterward. Giving birth a year later became its own kind of hell. “Do you know what happened when I gave birth to my son? All of his paperwork got kicked back,” she says, because the office said it couldn’t find evidence of her own birth. “My son's birth certificate had to be amended twice. I'm a week postpartum, 22 years old, running all over town with my husband getting notarized documents,” she says. “All I want is for my kid to have … of all the things in the world, a Social Security number and a birth certificate from the get-go.”
More than two decades on, Townsend is still haunted because she lacked a birth certificate and a Social Security number earlier in life. “As an adult, you can't have a fucking normal existence, ever, because you always have to go through a routine that will remind you that no one cared, and that you were some pawn in a weird fucking game that will affect you for the rest of your life,” she says. “And like, yes, I'm a valid citizen. I live here. I am a person. I exist.”
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