How to Disappear Within the USA

Disappearing in the USA requires most of the steps described on the page How to Disappear.  There all that was needed was assuming another person’s identity.  That will work for disappearing in the USA, at least for while until they abolish cash.  However, you are limited to income and wages that are not reported to the IRS.

To disappear in the USA what you really need is a completely new identity with a birth certificate, a driver license, and an SSN or at the very least an individual tax identification number (ITIN) if you cannot obtain an SSN.

To acquire the foregoing documents, you need to create a past.  I don't know of any way to create a past with violating numerous laws. Even if a person is willing to violate the laws, and I don't recommend it, it is still problematic.

While it is best if you can accquire everything you need with a new identity, including the ability to get a passport, realistically you may have to settle for what you can get with your new identity.  I would suggest the following:

Using the methods described in the other pages of this heading, borrow an identity to get a driver license and a passport. 

Use the identical name and date of birth fro creating your new identity.  Discard the driver license if and when you obtain a driver license using your new identity. 

As described below in the example below, it is likely that you will not be able to obtain a passport.  Therefore, get a passport with your borrowed identity.  It is good for ten year so keep it safe but don't use it within the USA. That is because if the person whose identity you borrowed obtains a passport, your passport will be canceled and flagged.

If you need to travel outside the USA, walk across the border into Mexico and travel from there.  You passport may not be valid within the USA and could subject you to being arrested should you attempt to use it within the USA.  However, other countries will accept it as valid.  After ten years with your new identity, it is more likely that you can be issued a passport with your new identity.

When and if you can acquire a passport using you new identity, burn the passport and completely discard the borrowed identity because you will not need it.

Under the heading New Identity and on the page Create a New Identity I will describe steps you could take to acquire a completely new identity.  However, first read the following which provides an example of how difficult that can be.

American Citizen age 70 Denied Passport
By Frank Gray | The Journal Gazette



Earl Saylor was born about 70 years ago in a house in the coal country hills of extreme southeast Kentucky.

“It was way back in the hollow,” or holler, as Saylor pronounces it, Salt Creek Holler in Harlan County. There were four houses in the holler, he says, and each was about a mile apart, connected by paths. There were no roads.

Earl Saylor was far from the first generation of his family to be born in Kentucky. His father was born there in 1906. About the time Saylor was born, his father was working for the WPA, a Depression-era federal program. He walked six or seven miles to work each day, leaving at 3 a.m. and getting home about 9 p.m. All that for 50 cents a day, Saylor says.

Before his father, there was Saylor’s grandfather, and before him there was a great-grandfather who owned the sides of two mountains.

The point here is that Saylor has deep roots in Kentucky, and in the United States. They go back not decades, but centuries.

Proving that is hard, though, because of the way life was lived in those then-remote areas. Saylor was born at home, delivered by a midwife. The midwife’s job, though, was delivering babies, not issuing birth certificates, so Saylor never got one. In fact, his birth wasn’t officially recorded anywhere, except in the family’s memory.

When Saylor was 16, he left the holler, hitchhiking to Chicago, where he got his first job, as a busboy in the company cafeteria at Aldens, a large Chicago mail-order house. He eventually became a machinist for American National Can.

Today, he’s retired and he still goes back to the holler frequently. That’s where his family and his roots are.

A few years ago, when he was planning to retire, Saylor realized he needed a birth certificate to collect Social Security, but, as we said, he didn’t have one. One didn’t exist.

So he got the next best thing, 64 years after his birth: a delayed certificate of birth. Family members issued statements that Saylor was born on a particular date at a particular place. It worked fine, and today Saylor is retired, occasionally traveling with his wife.

This spring, his wife made plans for a trip to Canada, to take place this year. It became clear that for the first time they would need passports.

Saylor and his wife went to the post office and applied at the same time, bringing all the documentation they needed.

A couple of weeks ago, Saylor’s wife received her passport, but Earl Saylor’s passport never arrived. So she called and was told, “Oh, didn’t you get a letter?”

It seems Saylor’s delayed certificate of birth isn’t good enough for a passport, though no one bothered to notify him until his wife called. He needs a real birth certificate. But there isn’t one – anywhere. There never was.

Well, school records, from kindergarten or first grade, the earlier the better, will do. Or proof from census reports taken after he was born, mentioning him by name, will do.

But Saylor went to school in a one-room schoolhouse that isn’t even there any more. There might be records somewhere, but finding them could take weeks, if they exist, says his wife, Lavinia. As for the census reports, she didn’t have the faintest idea where to get that.

It’s frustrating for the Saylors. They have all but written off the planned trip, but with the help of Sen. Richard Lugar’s office, they are continuing efforts to dredge up enough documentation to get the passport. Chances are they’ll need one someday.

But it does raise an interesting issue. How many people are there out there without birth certificates? How many were never issued one? How many were destroyed in buildings holding these records?

It’s more common than one might think, Lavinia Saylor says. It was very common in remote, rural areas of the South in the early 1900s, where babies were often born at home.

One can understand why. In those days, during the Depression, in remote areas, world travel wasn’t what people were thinking of when babies were born.