The Texas Attorney General’s Office today represented the Department of State Health Services in the U.S. District Court for the Western District in defense of its policy on the forms of identification accepted before issuing a birth certificate. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued the following statement:
“We stand in defense of the state of Texas, including the policies put in place to protect Texans’ most sensitive information and documents. In this case, a birth certificate is the key to a person’s very identity, and these vital documents must be protected by requiring basic, common-sense forms of identification in order to obtain copies. With identity theft a growing national concern, now is not the time to relax our requirements and accept forms of identification that may not sufficiently prove that a requestor is who they say they are.”