Then they came for the naturalized

With its attack on birthright citizenship and its new memo promoting denaturalization, the Trump regime is seeking to eviscerate citizenship itself

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We tend to take for granted the notion that this is a nation of immigrants. Born or naturalized, every United States citizen should be treated equally by the law. That’s the whole point of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, right?

But the idea of what constitutes equal protection has been hotly contested since the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and at times it’s even been turned against its apparent aims.

Now, with the notion of civil rights turned on its head, the very definition of citizenship is under pressure. Last week’s ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. opened the door to making birthright citizenship contingent on where in the United States a child is born, an upheaval and what amounts, potentially, to a shadow repeal of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. And that’s just the most recent crack in the edifice: since the Dobbs decision three years ago, women’s rights have varied by state — the very definition of second-class citizenship.

Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced a new attack on the concept, calling the status of the country’s 25 million naturalized citizens into question and making good on Stephen Miller’s 2023 threat to “turbocharge” the little-used process of stripping citizens of status, expanding it far beyond what had even been imagined during the red scares of the last century. As Robert McCoy writes in The New Republic,

Political scientist Patrick Weil estimates that, between 1907 and 1967, over 22,000 Americans were denaturalized—including, infamously, for political reasons during the first and second red scares. Denaturalization then fell out of use considerably, with only about 11 cases occurring each year from 1990 to 2017.

According to the Department of Justice’s memo, the effort purports to target criminals — but that’s a category it defines very loosely:

The benefits of civil denaturalization include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States.

Trump’s campaign promise to deport undocumented “criminals” has expanded into a massive program of renditions and removals threatening 15-20 million people, in excess of the number of undocumented persons believed to be in the U.S. in the first place. And as has become clear in the cases of permanent residents and visa holders such as Mahmoud Kahlil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Rasha Alawieh, the definition of what constitutes “crime” or a “threat to the United States” is flexible enough to encompass any target. And 90 percent of the people sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison had no criminal records.

Even if unauthorized entry to the U.S. is a crime, overstaying a visa — and even living undocumented in the U.S. — is a civil violation. All of these recent maneuvers by the Trump regime have been part of an effort to criminalize and make deportable new categories of people — even asylum seekers, many of whom applied after entering the U.S. (Many of those who’ve been arrested by ICE agents at court after making their required appearances fall into this category). As Priscilla Alvarez writes for CNN, the White House is inventing entire new classes of “crime” and “criminals” to hit quotas:

As federal authorities come under pressure to deliver historic immigration arrest numbers, administration officials have quietly been working on efforts to make more people eligible for removal.

The people being targeted in this case are those who entered the US unlawfully and later applied for asylum, the sources said. Their cases are expected to be closed, therefore leaving them at risk of deportation.

And it’s easy to imagine the concept of citizenship contracting, much as the scope of immigration “crime” has expanded. As the legal analyst Joyce Vance writes of the foggy language with which the DOJ memo defines the grounds for denaturalization, the problem isn’t where it starts, but where it might end:

The provision is so vague that it would permit the Division to denaturalize for just about anything. It could be something prior to or following naturalization. Given the other priorities discussed in the memo, it could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers? All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone. “Oopsie,” and there’s nothing we can do to get them back.

As the budget threatens to reshape American institutions, the campaign against citizenship threatens to renegotiate who counts as an American — and who doesn’t.

As M. Gessen writes for The New Yorker, the ambiguities and variabilities of law and the reasons people emigrate or seek asylum in the first place threaten almost any immigrant:

Over the years, the applications for both citizenship and permanent residence have grown ever longer, filling with questions that seem to be designed to be used against the applicant. Question 26 on the green-card application, for example, reads, “Have you EVER committed a crime of any kind (even if you were not arrested, cited, charged with, or tried for that crime)?” (Emphasis in the original.) The question does not specify whether it refers to a crime under current U.S. law or the laws of the country in which the crime might have been committed. In the Soviet Union of my youth, it was illegal to possess foreign currency or to spend the night anywhere you were not registered to live. In more than seventy countries, same-sex sexual activity is still illegal. On closer inspection, just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar.

And as they continue, that ever-present ambiguity can always give a government bent on removals a reason to act, and the threat removes the “assumption of permanence” on which citizenship — and belonging — depend.

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