This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case that involves the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents with either temporary or no legal status, clearing the way for the policy to go into effect. In its usual mealy-mouthed way, the court didn’t actually rule on the merits of the proclamation, but on the question of whether lower court judges could block it, and other administration policies, around the country. This cleared the way for the proclamation’s implementation without actually formally determining if it was constitutional (which it is not).
The ACLU quickly filed a nationwide class action lawsuit that seeks to block the policy again, and it remains unclear if it will actually go into effect in the areas of the country where the more limited injunction doesn’t stand. (For the record, even if it is implemented, it is not retroactive, as many people fear; it would only apply going forward.) Days later, the Justice Department issued a memo saying among other things it would be “prioritizing denaturalization” for naturalized U.S. citizens that had committed crimes or fraud not previously disclosed, or had otherwise made “material misrepresentations” — a mandate so wide you could drive a truck through it.
Why they’re trying to send us all home
That was on the heels of a sitting congressman, the execrable Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, sending Attorney General Pam Bondi a letter calling on the department to denaturalize and deport Zohran Mamdani, the New York legislator who had just scored a stunning upset victory in the Democratic mayoral primary. As evidence, he pointed to (and I’m not making this up) a 2008 rap video in which Mamdani said “Free the Holy Land Five / my guys,” a reference to the conviction of members of the Holy Land Foundation in a trial that has been criticized by groups including Human Rights Watch. Ogles argued that that lyric constituted material support for terrorism while noting that “I understand that some may raise First Amendment concerns” in what is one of the greatest understatements I have ever seen. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about this Tuesday and said, “I have not seen those claims, but surely if they are true, it’s something that should be investigated.” All of this has left many naturalized citizens with a sort of whiplash amounting to, “are we next?”
As a longtime immigration beat reporter who followed the travails of the first Trump administration and the promises of the second campaign, I basically knew that something like this was coming. Yet plainly stating what the ultimate project of this administration and Stephen Miller was and where they were going to go with it got a lot of people calling me and others exaggerated or hysterical. Of course, I did not know exactly that there would be a naturalized citizen candidate for mayor that the Trump administration would openly talk about investigating for immigration consequences. Even the suggestion that Trump would be actively going after permanent residents, let alone citizens, explicitly over political opposition and speech would have seemed to many people totally unthinkable just a few months ago.
This is about power, not immigration
This puts a lie to the idea that any of this is at its basic level about immigration compliance. It’s about power and the ability to wield it expansively. Take the thrice-convicted felon who was set to be deported until the administration struck a deal to release him specifically to testify against Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland father with no criminal record who was illegally deported to a Salvadoran mega-prison months ago and was finally returned — weeks after a judge had ordered it — only to be immediately put on criminal trial.
To put this into plain terms, this is the administration releasing what seems to be a hardened criminal — precisely the sort of person that Trump supporters might have imagined as the “bad hombres” that he would be targeting, and which administration figures like Pam Bondi, Karoline Leavitt and Tom Homan would point to as the ultimate targets of their enforcement campaigns — so that it can continue to persecute a man it illegally deported, just to show that it can.
I think that’s the fundamental point about all of this: they made a grievous mistake and acknowledged it, and have spent the intervening months regretting that they acknowledged it and are furious that anyone dared to question them. It’s about projecting outward that the administration can do what it wants to who it wants — particularly if they have any kind of an immigration hook to latch onto — and that it doesn’t matter if they have to ignore court orders or release some violent criminals in order to have their way.
The good news: It’s really hard to denaturalize
All this said, I want people to understand that this is, like much else that the administration has done so far, primarily a public relations effort. It is legally extraordinarily difficult to actually strip someone of citizenship and can only be done under very specific sets of circumstances. Both civil and criminal denaturalizations require high standards of evidence that someone has deliberately misrepresented facts that go beyond minor inaccuracies, or has willfully obtained citizenship through clear and convincing fraud. There have been very few proceedings in recent years for that reason, averaging about 11 per year.
Unlike all other immigration proceedings, which go through immigration courts made up of administrative judges under the Justice Department, denaturalization proceedings must go through independent Article III federal judges, who I would assume are largely going to be unwilling to go along with the indiscriminate stripping of what is supposed to be the ultimate form of allegiance and a legal marker of full integration into American civil society and the political sphere.
But in the same way that many legal permanent residents may now feel chilled in their ability to engage in speech and politics after having seen the high-profile arrests of several activists, as well as the somewhat random and indiscriminate detentions of other visa holders and permanent residents, this effort seems at least partly geared towards engendering a certain climate of fear. It seeks to give the sense that opposing the administration is a dangerous game, regardless of your putative legal ability to do so.
The dirty secret here is that being ultimately victorious in the courts only does so much when you have to, for example, spend three months in federal detention before a judge orders you released. This was the case for Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his son as he languished in detention centers that are overcrowded and unsanitary.
Once again, the cruelty is the point
As I wrote recently for The New Republic, the so-called “big, beautiful bill” that Trump has managed to push through the Senate and which is now returning to what is potentially a successful final vote in the House, rains down massive resources for just such detention and enforcement. Trump this week personally visited the obscene cage camp they’ve dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” where his administration may well try to send those that advance disfavored political ideas or engage in speech it doesn’t like. All it takes is for them to do it a couple of times, or even seriously discuss the possibility of aggressive denaturalization, for a whole lot of people to basically decide it’s not worth it, which is exactly the point.
This also further sets out the framework for there to be a sort of formal and informal second class citizenship; naturalized citizens have always had a slightly different status in this country for a couple of reasons, among them that they could be denaturalized and could not, for example, run for president. Still, for a long time we’ve essentially regarded all citizens as equal, and in fact that has been a relatively fundamental part of our political ethos and the principles we know broadly as the American dream. It’s clear now that Trump and Miller and the rest of them are intent on explicitly drawing a line between these classes of citizens and making it explicit that they are not the same in the government’s eyes.
Of course, the legal status and citizenship questions are, in the end, just a convenient proxy and tool for what is in its most distilled form a racial and ideological project. They would just as quickly go after natural-born citizens if it was as easy. In fact, they’ve already set the groundwork with the birthright citizenship effort, and in Trump’s own recent musing after his visit to the Florida camp, he said that of the ostensible criminals he wants to deport, “many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth… So maybe that will be the next job.”
