Trump's denaturalization threat should be taken seriously

A dramatic escalation, explained

Imagine being “unpersoned” by your government.

What does that mean? What would it look like? How would it begin? Most likely by revoking someone’s citizenship and the rights that accompany that status. That’s why it’s so troubling to hear about President Donald Trump’s expanding denaturalization efforts.

Initially, the Trump administration stepped up immigration enforcement by promising the public they would target “the worst of the worst” criminals, but now thousands of longtime residents, beneficiaries of humanitarian programs, and even U.S. citizens are being swept up in the raids. And there’s no reason to think Trump is going to stop here: his administration is increasingly flirting with the idea that people can be denaturalized and deported as punishment for political speech.

Just this week, Trump threatened to seek the denaturalization of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City who has promised to stand up to the administration’s policies. These aren’t just words. Since coming into office, Trump has sought to end birthright citizenship, and in June, the DOJ issued a memo instructing its Civil Division to prioritize denaturalization cases.

We should take these words and actions seriously. Many of Trump’s most extreme autocratic promises, especially when it comes to immigration policies, are coming true — and Congress just gave him $170 billion more to spend on detention camps, ICE agents, and deportations. Leaders of authoritarian regimes often take great interest in denaturalization as a tool for political repression, and it would be naive to think these tactics can’t be implemented here.

How the Trump administration is turning on U.S. citizens

The administration’s attacks on the sanctity of U.S. citizenship began on the first day of Trump’s term with the executive order to stop acknowledging birthright citizenship for hundreds of thousands of babies born in the U.S. each year. Rejecting more than a century of settled law and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, the administration seeks to recognize birthright citizenship only for children born to U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. (It’s worth noting that even the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to reject this extreme notion at oral argument — even if they couldn’t resist the opportunity to put lower courts in their place and limit the use of nationwide injunctions.)

Read more: The thing that worries us about the Supreme Court

And the attacks on citizens didn’t stop there. When Trump unleashed DHS to pursue its aggressive mass deportation campaign this spring, U.S. citizens almost immediately began to be swept up in the immigration enforcement machinery.

A lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU of Southern California alleges that:

Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind. If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained. Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.

One of the plaintiffs in the case is a U.S. citizen who worked at a carwash that was raided three times in a single month. Just because the man didn’t have his passport with him at work, he was detained in an ICE vehicle — he suspects because of his Latino appearance and accent. Another U.S. citizen plaintiff was stopped, detained, and had his phone taken from him — without the masked agents ever asking to see his identification.

Worse yet, Trump has repeatedly suggested that he’ll use this deportation machine to actually target citizens, especially those who might criticize him.

He told El Salvador’s President Bukele that he wanted to send “homegrowns” to the infamous CECOT prison. He and his allies have repeatedly floated the idea of deporting Mamdani, the New York mayoral candidate. Trump even suggested his administration might “take a look” at deporting Elon Musk, now that Musk is criticizing Trump’s tax-and-spending bill and discussing forming a third party.

Eroding citizenship rights empowers authoritarians

Threatening to revoke a person’s citizenship is a powerful tool to quash dissent. Symbolically, it casts dissent as traitorous; practically, it is often a precursor to property seizures and deportation. In recent years, it has become a common tactic of authoritarian regimes across the globe, as Freedom House has documented.

Indeed, the U.S. has itself dabbled in these tactics in darker chapters of its history. In 1919, the anarchist activist Emma Goldman was stripped of her citizenship and deported because of her political activism. Throughout the Red Scares, the Justice Department somewhat regularly sought to revoke citizenship of people suspected of Communist or Socialist ties.

But denaturalization isn’t only a tool for political repression: it can also be a tool for racial control and even ethnic cleansing. Far-right extremists, especially in Europe, have called for “remigration” — the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their European-born descendants. Troublingly, Trump has increasingly embraced this language, last month calling for “the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came.” The State Department proposed creating an Office of Remigration as part of a restructuring plan.

Here, too, U.S. history offers a cautionary tale. In the late nineteenth century, hostility to Chinese immigrants led Congress to impose the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred most immigrants from China and denied Chinese residents the ability to naturalize. That was later expanded to limit naturalization to “free white persons” and those of African descent. Denaturalization became a tool — embraced by the Supreme Court — to enforce those restrictions.

Revoking citizenship is an especially dangerous tool in the hands of an authoritarian because of the severity of the consequences it imposes — not just for the targeted immigrant, but potentially for any family members who became citizens alongside them. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren:

It subjects the individual to a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress. He knows not what discriminations may be established against him, what proscriptions may be directed against him, and when and for what cause his existence in his native land may be terminated. He may be subject to banishment, a fate universally decried by civilized people. He is stateless, a condition deplored in the international community of democracies. It is no answer to suggest that all the disastrous consequences of this fate may not be brought to bear on a stateless person. The threat makes the punishment obnoxious.

But… is it legal?

The law here is clear: Stripping citizenship is, and should be, hard to do. Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, naturalized citizens can be stripped of their citizenship only if the citizenship was fraudulently or illegally procured. Only a court can revoke someone’s citizenship (though this can be through a civil, rather than criminal, proceeding). The government must prove its case by “clear and convincing” evidence, and a denaturalization is subject to more searching appellate review.

Consistent with this idea that citizenship-stripping should be reserved for extreme cases, denaturalization cases have been rare in recent decades. The Supreme Court’s docket is a good illustration: The three denaturalization cases to reach the Supreme Court since 1971 have involved (1) a guard at the infamous Treblinka concentration camp, (2) a man alleged to have participated in the execution of Lithuanian civilians as a concentration-camp guard, and (3) the wife of a Serbian war criminal.

But the first Trump administration sought to expand the use of denaturalization, establishing a task force — Operation Janus — to investigate fraudulent citizenship applications and to increase the use of civil denaturalization proceedings in particular. Almost immediately, the program began to target immigrants who were a far cry from the Nazi war criminals of denaturalizations past and who might even have been victims of fraud themselves. Overall, denaturalization cases referred to DOJ increased 600 percent from 2017 to 2020, though the number of individuals actually denaturalized remained small.

More aggressive pursuit of denaturalization cases could bring about some seriously troubling results. Material errors or omissions in a naturalization application are one ground for denaturalization. And it’s easy to make mistakes on immigration paperwork that seeks information on every group you’ve ever been a member of. (That’s one rationale the U.S. is now using to try to strip Mahmoud Khalil of his green card.) While courts should reject efforts to denaturalize people based on minor paperwork errors, even baseless charges could leave U.S. citizens tangled up in court proceedings for years.

Moreover, as Jonathan V. Last pointed out in The Bulwark last week, the law still permits the government to revoke citizenship from anyone who joins a Communist-affiliated group (very broadly defined) within five years of becoming a citizen. And how are Trump and his allies now trying to smear Zohran Mamdani?

Calling him a “Communist.”