Trump’s newest attack on US citizens runs into legal brick wall

Far-right MAGA Republicans have been calling not only for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, but also, for naturalized U.S. citizens to be stripped of their citizenship because of their political views. Some MAGA Republicans have called for prominent U.S. citizens like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda) and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (who is originally from Somalia) to be denaturalized and deported. But according to National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Jaclyn Diaz, the Trump administration's push for mass denaturalization is proving to be much more difficult legally than the MAGA movement anticipated.

According to Diaz, the denaturalization cases filed so far underscore the "legal and practical constraints on using this tool more broadly."

Diaz reports, "NPR reviewed 34 publicly announced denaturalization cases filed or resolved by the DOJ as of May 19, including 11 revocations of citizenship…. In the last 16 months, the Trump Justice Department says it surpassed the number of cases filed during all four years of the Biden administration — 64, according to available data. The administration is pitching a supercharged denaturalization effort as yet another way to address border security."

Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College law professor known for his expertise on immigration law, told NPR, "I'm not seeing a major surge of worrisome denaturalizations. To me, it's not at the level of an emergency."

According to Kanstroom, naturalized U.S. citizens enjoy much stronger legal protections than undocumented immigrants.

Kanstroom told NPR, "These are cases in which the law is pretty clear that people are entitled to due process. They're entitled to be heard by a federal judge, not just an immigration judge. So the protections in place for people facing denaturalization are pretty robust."

Nonetheless, Case Western Reserve University law professor Cassandra Robertson finds it deeply troubling that the Trump administration is willing to target U.S. citizens for denaturalization because of their political views.

Robertson told NPR, "The denaturalization efforts are an attempt to suppress the political speech of naturalized citizens. Although the cases that have been brought first are maybe people who've committed some pretty bad crimes, the government's rhetoric is certainly not limited to that."

Diaz notes, "Robertson, of Case Western, said the government appears to be intentionally picking cases with criminal convictions because they are easier to win. Still, Robertson, who has studied U.S. denaturalization, worries about where the policy could lead, especially because civil denaturalization cases come with fewer protections than criminal proceedings do."

Robertson told NPR, "It's just a dangerous road to go down for denaturalization. I might not feel sorry for the heinous child abuser who loses their citizenship. I'm not going to lose sleep over that. But I am going to lose sleep over what it does to the system. Because once it becomes easy to take somebody's citizenship away — it becomes easy to take anybody's citizenship away."