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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. The first Trump administration initiated denaturalization proceedings against 168 people. And the current Trump administration is seeking to operate in another stratosphere altogether. In December, internal guidance suggested the administration sought to pursue “100-200 denaturalization cases per month”, according to New York Times reporting.
The problem here is not the idea of denaturalization. There are legitimate and specific reasons why someone might lose US citizenship. The law as it stands does allow for the revocation of citizenship if it was procured by fraud, willful misrepresentation, or concealment of a material fact, among a few other categories. But many of the categories of people now subject to denaturalization, following last year’s memo, “are not grounded in statute and are ripe for political abuse given their breadth”, says the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
I couldn’t agree more. Those now subject to denaturalization, according to the memo, include any naturalized citizen the Department of Justice “determines to be sufficiently important to pursue”, any citizen deemed “a threat to national security”, and any citizen with “pending criminal charges”. Those are, needless to say, very capacious categories. And note the pending in the last example. You don’t have to be convicted of anything. Simply criticizing Trump may be enough grounds to lose your citizenship, the AILA warns: “The administration is now turning enforcement into a political weapon that will ensnare people with minor infractions and those who express views critical of the current administration, even if they have not been found guilty of any wrongdoing.”
Surely the vast majority of citizens subject to denaturalization will be immigrants of color to this country, and this too must not be lost on anyone. What else should we expect from an administration that has all but ended refugee resettlement to the US except for white South Africans? What do we expect from an administration that placed Greg Bovino in charge of immigration enforcement? This same Bovino was recently the headliner at an extreme-right “Remigration Summit” in Portugal. Remigration, if you’re not into the lingo, refers to plans for the mass expulsion of non-white immigrants and citizens from western countries. At a D-Day commemoration in France, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, used similar language, characterizing Europe as facing an “invasion” of immigrants and claiming that European beaches today “are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”.
These are small ideas held by small-minded men, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t cause major trouble for too many people. Trump and his administration want us to believe that racial tribalism is our only future, and they’re more than willing to pervert the rule of law to fit their clouded vision.
Forget citizenship. What must really be denaturalized is the belief that human value is connected to the color of one’s skin. The fact that I feel compelled to repeat this basic truism is not just a tragedy. It’s also an indication of how much basic human understanding we’re continuously losing under this administration.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
