President Donald Trump is reviving a familiar playbook to target naturalized US citizens.
The Justice Department recently announced a new push to strip certain people of their citizenship through denaturalization proceedings. Individuals who pose a danger to national security, have committed violent crimes, or fail to disclose a felony history (or make other misrepresentations) on their citizenship application are among those now being prioritized for denaturalization and deportation. In doing so, the administration is likely seeking to expand an authority that the Supreme Court drastically limited decades ago.
The president and White House officials have suggested that some prominent denaturalization targets could include one-time Trump megadonor Elon Musk, with whom the president had a public falling out, and Zohran Mamdani, a progressive who recently won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. It’s not clear, however, what legitimate grounds the administration might have to denaturalize either of them.
The news may rattle any of the estimated 24.5 million naturalized citizens currently living in the US. That might especially be the case for those who have voiced opposition to Trump, given that his administration has already weaponized immigration policy against dissidents.
Ostensibly, denaturalization is about protecting the integrity of the citizenship process. In practice, the new push “is about targeting speech the government doesn’t like, and it is chilling all naturalized citizens,” said Amanda Frost, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and author of You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping From Dred Scott to the Dreamers.
This wouldn’t be the first time denaturalization has been used as a tool of political repression. During the Red Scare following World War II, the US pursued denaturalization cases with an eye toward rooting out un-American behavior, both real and perceived.
Scholars now see echoes of that era in Trump’s strategy.
“There’s increasing rhetoric of trying to take people’s citizenship away for political reasons,” said Cassandra Burke Robinson, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who has studied denaturalization. “I think any time you treat that as even a possibility to be considered, you’re going down a really dangerous slope.”
What denaturalization looked like during the Red Scare
In the 1950s and 1960s, fears about the spread of communism took hold of the US. A political movement known as McCarthyism — named after then-Senator Joseph McCarthy — sought to purge anyone in government with connections to the Communist Party. Denaturalization was one of the tools McCarthyites relied on, and, at the height of the movement, the US was denaturalizing more than 20,000 people per year, Burke Robinson said.
In these cases, the government argued that if an individual became a member of the Communist Party at any time, that person had been lying when taking an oath of allegiance to the US as part of their citizenship test and, therefore, could be denaturalized. Later, that argument evolved to target Americans with disfavored political views or who were perceived as disloyal to the US more broadly, not just Communist Party members.
One of the primary targets of denaturalization were members of the German American Bund, the American Nazi organization. However, targets also included political gadflies, such as labor leaders, journalists, and anarchists.
“Those whose speech the government didn’t like could get removed, and everyone else could stay. They used their discretion in this area to accomplish that goal,” Frost said.
Among those targeted for denaturalization was the Australian-born labor leader Harry Bridges, who led longshoremen strikes in California. He accepted support from the Communist Party as part of his union activities, but the government never found evidence that he was a member himself. The notorious House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Bridges, and the government sought his deportation and, once he became a citizen, denaturalization, but never succeeded.
Denaturalizations decreased significantly, from tens of thousands to fewer than 10 annually, after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Afroyim v. Rusk. In that case, the justices found that the US government does not have the power to denaturalize people without their consent because citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
“They said you could only lose your citizenship if you very explicitly renounce,” Frost said. “The United States government governs with the consent of the citizens. It’s not allowed to choose its citizens.”
For decades, the ruling meant that denaturalization was a rare phenomenon. However, the court included an exception for cases in which citizenship is “unlawfully procured” — meaning they were not eligible for citizenship in the first place due to acts like committing war crimes. That’s what Trump is now relying on to revive the tactic.
What Trump’s denaturalization plans could look like
Denaturalizations have been increasing since the Obama administration, when the digitization of naturalization records made it easier to identify individuals whose citizenship applications showed discrepancies with other government records. Most denaturalization cases during this period involved people who had committed acts of terrorism or war crimes.
But Trump made denaturalization a priority during his first administration, including targeting anyone who merely had errors on their naturalization papers. The DOJ launched a new section focused on denaturalization and investigated some 700,000 naturalized citizens, resulting in 168 active denaturalization cases — more than under any other modern president. It’s not clear how many of them were ultimately denaturalized and deported.
Trump is now picking up where he left off. The administration has said that it will pursue these denaturalization cases in civil rather than criminal court proceedings. In such proceedings, individuals are not entitled to an attorney, and the legal bar for the administration to prove that a citizen did something to warrant denaturalization is lower than it would be in criminal court. There is also no limit on how long after naturalization the government can seek to revoke someone’s citizenship.
All of that raises due process concerns.
“Somebody might not know about the proceedings against them. There might be a good defense that they’re not able to offer. There’s no right to an attorney,” Burke Robinson said. “It seems to me to be really problematic.”
There’s also the question of to what degree this Supreme Court will be willing to rein in Trump’s denaturalization efforts. Its 2017 decision in Maslenjak v. United States maintained a high bar for denaturalization: The court found that an alleged misstatement in a Bosnian refugee’s citizenship paperwork could not have kept them from becoming a citizen, even if it had been discovered before their naturalization, and could not be used as grounds to denaturalize them in criminal proceedings.
That makes Burke Robinson “somewhat hopeful that the court does take the issue very seriously.”
“But that was 2017,” she added. “It is a different court now, so it’s very hard to predict.”
