The next step in the Trump administration’s deportation campaign is here. The Department of Justice will prioritize stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans it says have violated the law, a process known as “denaturalization.”
Denaturalization gives the White House “another tool to police immigrants’ free speech rights,” said Axios. The administration has already used the deportation process to target immigrant students who criticized Israel’s war on Gaza, including green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil. The Justice Department guidance says denaturalization proceedings will be focused on “terrorists,” as well as people convicted of “war crimes,” “extrajudicial killings,” and “human rights abuses.”
The denaturalization program is an attempt to “protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals, and terrorists,” said The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky. But immigration experts “expressed serious concerns about the effort’s constitutionality,” said NPR. The Justice Department will pursue denaturalization in civil courts, which require a lower burden of proof for the government to win. They also do not require that defendants be furnished with an attorney. The Trump administration is “trying to create a second class of U.S. citizens” with fewer rights, said Sameera Hafiz, policy director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
What did the commentators say?
“Aggressive” denaturalization is at odds with “constitutional principles of citizenship,” law professors Cassandra Burke Robertson and Irina D. Manta said at MSNBC. There is an unsavory history: “Denaturalization was relatively rare” for most of American history but “spiked during the Red Scare era.” The Supreme Court in the 1960s limited denaturalization to those who had “illegally procured” citizenship through fraud or failing to meet naturalization requirements. Going beyond that represents the sort of “arbitrary governmental authority the Constitution was designed to prevent.”
Pursuing denaturalization in civil courts lets the Trump administration paint potential deportees as “criminal” while “avoiding the safeguards of an actual criminal court,” said Rafia Zakaria at The Nation. There is no statute of limitation on civil denaturalizations, allowing Justice Department lawyers to “target US citizens who were naturalized decades earlier.” But there is more than citizenship at stake: The threat of denaturalization will allow the Trump administration to tamp down on dissent from migrant citizens “who know that they could either face deportation or massive debt” from attorneys’ fees. Either way, the “Trump administration wins.”
What next?
Republicans already have a political target for denaturalization: Uganda-born Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral candidate. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) has called on the Justice Department to strip Mamdani of citizenship, said Semafor. Mamdani’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America “would have disqualified him” from citizenship because it is a “communist organization,” Ogles said. If those claims are “true, it’s something that should be investigated,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Mamdani was defiant in response. New York is “my home,” he said on X. “And I’m proud to be a citizen, which means standing up for our Constitution.”
Using civil courts lowers the burden of proof
