Ken Klippenstein - Donald Trump has elevated Zohran Mamdani’s run for mayor to being a matter of national security, and his administration is working to concoct a premise by which he and other naturalized Americans can be stripped of their citizenship. What applies to Mamdani also applies to Elon Musk, whom Trump has also implied he might deport. But it’s not a mere sideshow in the president’s stream of consciousness.
Last month, according to an internal memo, the Justice Department ordered its attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” — the process by which naturalized Americans can be stripped of their citizenship — not for fraud or criminality, but “against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security.”
It’s a limitless phrase — national security — and it is one that has not been applied to strip someone of their citizenship. It is also not synonymous with terrorism, treason, or even subversion, all causes, according to the feds, to denaturalize and deport individuals. It stands alone, a vague and dangerous phrase that floats above all else.
Denaturalization, while rare, does sometimes happen. But even in cases such as terrorism or the prior commission of war crimes, those involved have their day in court. “National security,” on the other hand, is solely an unchallengeable assertion, one that courts can’t really substantively question (except on some narrow procedural grounds). That’s what makes its weaponization against the American people so appalling.
Time - Legal experts have said that deporting U.S. citizens for any reason is unconstitutional, but the Trump Administration appears to be circumventing that restriction by pushing to strip citizenship from certain people, through a process known as denaturalization. While denaturalization can only apply to naturalized citizens, that group is estimated to number more than 25 million, or more than 7% of the U.S. population.
Denaturalization has a long and complex history in the United States. Patrick Weil, a historian and director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and visiting professor of law at Yale University, wrote a book on it in 2012 called The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic.
In it, Weil argues that the institution and evolution of denaturalization “made a quiet yet major contribution to the transformation of contemporary American citizenship.”
Through changes in law and Supreme Court rulings, denaturalization went from a process that was broadly used to make the citizenship of foreign-born Americans conditional on their behavior to a rare practice that, because of its high threshold, Weil argues, reifies the near inviolability of U.S. citizenship, naturalized or otherwise.
While Weil outlines a number of laws, court cases, and executive-branch actions that shaped denaturalization over the years, the three main turning points came in 1906, 1940, and 1967.
When the Naturalization Act of 1906 was passed to try to federalize naturalization processes, it included a provision on denaturalization that Weil writes “was originally and primarily conceived as a means of redressing naturalization fraud and illegality committed prior to or during the naturalization process itself—before the moment an alien obtained American citizenship.” In reality, however, in the following decades, most denaturalizations “occurred out of a desire to expel from the body politic ‘un-American’ citizens: most of them not for fraud or illegality committed before they were naturalized, but because of who they were or what they had done after they obtained American citizenship.”
“Denaturalization became a means for cleansing the American body politic of those naturalized citizens who behaved in ways considered un-American, due to their attachment to a ‘foreign’ morality or to their race, land of origin, or political ideas—sometimes before their naturalization, but, most often, developed afterward,” Weil writes. It became “a tool for ridding the American citizenry of ‘undesirables.’”
“If a naturalized citizen was Asian, spoke out against war, was a Socialist, a Communist, or a fascist, or lived abroad, she risked the loss of her American citizenship,” Weil writes, though he noted that: “from 1906 until the end of the 1930s, denaturalizations for political or racial reasons numbered fewer than one hundred. The majority of cases continued to revolve—at a pace of hundreds some years—around foreign-born Americans residing abroad.”
During World War II, denaturalization “became an integral part of a proactive program by the Justice Department to bolster national security against threats from America’s ‘enemies.’”
But “foreign-born Americans were not the only ones at risk,” Weil explained. “When denaturalization became a central part of the government’s national security policy during World War II, the 1940 Nationality Act also expanded the number of American-born citizens subject to automatic loss of citizenship.” Before, only American-born citizens who acquired a foreign citizenship could be subject to denationalization, but the 1940 law “extended the denationalization power to include those Americans who had evaded the draft, joined a foreign army, or participated in foreign elections.”
That’s when “the Supreme Court intervened and began to reduce the scope of the federal government’s denaturalization authority.” Weil writes: “Before the outbreak of war, the Supreme Court had backed the authority of the executive to pursue the denaturalization of new Americans for failing to adhere to a myriad of legal minutiae, from the form of naturalization applications, to the duration of U.S. residence, to the age of their arrival in the United States.” But over the next three decades, it would take up a number of cases relating to denaturalization and denationalization.
“About half of the Court, depending on the particulars of a given case, continued to uphold the authority of Congress to deprive naturalized and native Americans alike of their citizenship. As the basis for its decisions, the Court asserted judicial restraint and the exclusive authority of the elected branches over foreign affairs. The other half of the Court, however, invoked a number of constitutional rights in support of striking down and restricting laws permitting denaturalization and expatriation. Denaturalization had provoked a fierce debate on the Supreme Court between these two factions,” Weil summarizes. “Although intensely divided, the Court progressively reduced the scope of the federal government’s authority to revoke American citizenship. It did so, in part, by upholding free speech and procedural guarantees for foreign-born Americans.”
The most significant ruling came in 1967 when Justice Hugo Black outlined in Afroyim v. Rusk, according to Weil, “an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that secured for all—native-born and naturalized—the full set of privileges entailed in American citizenship. American citizenship was no longer a contingent benefit conferred by a sovereign state in exchange for its citizens’ respect for the laws.”
In the ruling, Black wrote: “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.”
Although denaturalization was sharply restricted from that point onward, Weil notes that “a nearly unanimous Court permitted—and still permits, in narrow circumstances—a naturalized citizen to lose her American citizenship.” MORE
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