Denaturalization: Targeting Undesirable Citizens
Yet another immigration policy is being weaponized
For many people who arrive in the US as immigrants, the formal ceremony of conferring citizenship probably comes as a relief. It feels like the closing of one door, the opening of a new one into a safer world, finally enjoying the rights of citizenship like being able to vote. Now, some are feeling threatened by an escalating right-wing campaign and rhetoric that aims to strip US citizenship from individuals viewed as undesirable. Project 2025 calls for war on undocumented immigrants, and proposes to return foreign-born citizens to countries of origin (remigration) – now, the latest mantra is fast-tracking denaturalization.
The US has 24.5 million naturalized citizens, including a minority who first entered via Temporary Protection Status (TPS) visa programs and later completed the steps to citizenship. A very rare number have been denaturalized, or stripped of their citizenship, for a variety of reasons. Being outed as a former Nazi is one, but there are others (see below). Now, Project 2025 architects who do double duty as top Trump campaign aides have declared that the rate of denaturalization cases will be “turbocharged,” to quote Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s draconian immigration policy and his former senior policy advisor.
Under his tenure, denaturalization rates increased. Miller’s comments mirror those made by Donald Trump and JD Vance in relation to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and Venezuelans in Aurora, Colorado, recently. The candidates echoed debunked racist claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating the dogs and cats of locals, a rumor begun and flamed by by a US neo-Nazi group that also marched in Springfield (see related story, The Politics of Retribution). The allegation was patently false and outrageous that it spawned a global tide of satiric cartoons (see example, below) that has exposed the expansion of their immigration target to include some citizens, too. The GOP leaders view the Haitian and Venezuelans as “illegal” although most are legal residents with Temporary Protected Status or on Humanitarian Parole, while others are already legal citizens. Trump continues to brand them a threat to local Springfield and Aurora citizens, despite knowing that they have entered legally and some are citizens. (The TPS program still requires people to qualify for a Green Card with a sponsor, then take legal steps to citizenship.)
That’s because Trump-Vance and Co, and Project 2025, want to get rid of the TPS program; Trump vows to invalidate TPS retroactively. In their shared view, citizens who got in via TPS aren’t “real citizens” and he’ll weaponize immigration law to denaturalize them and then kick them out. That’s one way that right-wing leaders hope to purge America of brown and black immigrants. It reflects Project 2025’s fundamentally racist, white supremacy agenda, one that deems foreign-born citizens as less than other citizens.
What Citizens Could Be Targeted for Denaturalization?
Under US law, A naturalized US citizen can have that status taken away if the federal government proves by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence in a civil federal court proceeding, or satisfies the beyond a reasonable doubt standard in a comparable criminal case, that the citizen was not qualified for naturalization at the time it was mistakenly granted.
USCIS grounds for denaturalization are as follows:
• Naturalization was procured illegally (e.g., by fraud)
• Concealment of Material Fact or Willful Misrepresentation, such as concealing a fact during application, or membership in certain organizations within 5 years of attaining citizenship (Communist party, other totalitarian party, or terrorist organization, which are not defined)
• Wartime military service that resulted in a less than honorable discharge with a five-year period after naturalization.
• Refusing under specified circumstances to testify before a congressional committee on alleged subversive activities.
For more, see: “Denaturalization and Revocation of Naturalization,” a Practice Advisory brief, National Immigration Project, February 2020
Some claim that the law to date constrains the process of denaturalization, so we should not worry, despite the Trump track record. But immigration activists warn that conservative judges have recently overturned previously “settled law” interpretations (see main story), and worry about what the conservative-majority Supreme Court might do with a denaturalization case.
Project 2025 also makes clear its goal of stripping civil rights from classes of people it perceives as undesirable, including Muslims from “enemy” countries, and LGBTQIA+ people from countries where it’s a crime to be gay, while criminalizing anyone supporting abortion. What’s amply clear from the escalating right-wing rhetoric around denaturalization is that, like remigration, it serves as a racist tool that supports a vision of America as nation by and for whites. That is also the vision that motivates Project 2025. – SO’D.