Trump is stripping Americans of their citizenship at a shocking rate

I wrote about the Trump administration seeking to denaturalize 17 people, part of an effort unprecedented in modern US history, for The Guardian.

I still remember my citizenship ceremony from 2011. There was a festive spirit among the dozens of us who were about to become the newest Americans, a kind of joy offset only by the anxiety of having to turn in our green cards first. For years, I jealously guarded that little card, which was not only not green but also something I was repeatedly told by authorities to carry with me at all times. They had to pry it from my fingers that day.

At my ceremony, which I wrote about at the time, a representative from the New York City commission on human rights explained to her captive American audience what civil rights protections we had, and the judge who swore us in as citizens encouraged us to exercise our vote, serve on juries, run for office and speak out for our rights. We were each given a pocket constitution. The whole thing was a celebration of democratic values. I entered downtown Brooklyn that day as a resident alien. I left as a newly minted American citizen, equal in the eyes of the law to every other American citizen.

Oh, how quaint that time seems now. Immigrants without all the proper documents are not the only ones the Trump administration has its sights on. Naturalized immigrants are at a greater risk than at any time in recent memory of losing their hard-won citizenship, as the whole idea of citizenship gets put through Trump’s anti-immigration wringer. The Trump administration has been aggressively rattling the saber of denaturalization, a political tactic that incidentally is explored in Project 2025.

And about a year ago, the administration published a memo expanding the categories of people who could be prioritized for denaturalization. Last month, the administration began the process of rescinding US citizenship from 12 people. And this month, Trump’s Department of Justice has filed papers to strip 17 naturalized Americans of their citizenship.

This pace of denaturalization in the United States is unprecedented in our post-civil rights era. The Biden administration initiated only 64 cases of denaturalization over its entire four years in office. In 2008, the Obama administration began something called Operation Janus, a program that seemed set up to target Muslim communities in the United States, but that program hardly netted any denaturalization cases. We can take an even longer view. Between 1990 and 2017, there was a grand total of 305 denaturalization cases filed by the government. And, as one expert told the Washington Post, a number of those cases “involved aging former Nazis”.

Denaturalization, which was used excessively and ideologically up to and including the McCarthy era, has been used sparingly since a 1967 supreme court decision (Afroyim v Rusk) set a high legal bar for denaturalization. Since then, denaturalization has proven to be a difficult and costly undertaking for the government. The institution of citizenship has also been generally revered by successive administrations.

Not so with Donald Trump…

Read the rest here…