Guess Trump Is Going To Strip Citizenship From People For Whatever Now
Zohran Mamdani? Elon Musk? Who knows!
Welp, here comes the part of our national nightmare where the administration tries to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens who disagree with Lord and Savior Donald Trump, the guy who married two immigrants and sired four anchor babies! A Justice Department memo, dated June 11, announced that the DOJ will prioritize denaturalization of US citizens for people who committed violent and financial crimes, but also says the DOJ will pursue:
Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue. These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance. Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate.
Why, that could mean just about anything. Vagueness is an authoritarian’s favorite tool! As Joyce Vance points out on her Substack,
The provision is so vague that it would permit the Division to denaturalize for just about anything. It could be something prior to or following naturalization. Given the other priorities discussed in the memo, it could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers? All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone. “Oopsie,” and there’s nothing we can do to get them back. The way the memo is written, there is no guarantee DOJ will pursue cases against violent criminals—they could just do easy cases to ratchet up numbers like we’re seeing with deportation. Or they could target people who they view as troublemakers.
The Civil part is important, too, because defendants are not entitled to a lawyer, or a jury, and there’s a lower burden of proof for the government to reach. Also there’s no statute of limitations, so now non-native-born citizens must live in fear of the government digging up offenses from decades ago.
Stripping people of citizenship also will create stateless people, like those who renounced citizenship in another country, or were never recognized as citizens in the place they were born, or were born in countries that don’t exist any more. That’s already happening in cases like that of Jermaine Thomas, born in 1986 on a US Army base in Germany, who was recently deported to his father’s birthplace of Jamaica, where he had never been, for the crime of trespassing by standing in the yard of the house he had just been evicted from with his dog and belongings. And also refugee members of the Bhutanese community.
And is Dear Leader planning to try to take citizenship away from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani? Maybe! The world’s dowdiest 20-something, Karoline Leavitt, said they’re not against looking into it.
Remember how Trump slobbered to the president of El Salvador that he should build prisons for “homegrowns” next? He’s still on about that.
But it’s not just going for people going around bopping others on the head.
The Zohran Mamdani scandal: he became a US citizen in 2018, and in March 2017 put a track on Soundcloud under the name Zohran Kwame, “Salaam,” with the lyrics “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ‘em up.”
Or so goes the claim, the lyrics are really hard to pick out. Anyway, the Holy Land Five were five men convicted in 2008 of donating over $12 million to Hamas, so now the most rabidly anti-immigrant pukes in the party are calling for Mamdani to have his citizenship stripped, citing the line as proof that he was advocating for a terrorist organization and therefore did fraud on his citizenship application.
The loudest is Rep. Andy Ogles, the guy who allegedly stole money from a children’s cemetery and lost $300k of donations, who fired off a histrionic letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi last week about it.
Stephen Miller is surely all for it; the New York Times reports that Trump not-disapprovingly told a campaign meeting last year that if it was up to Stephen Miller, there would only be 100 million people living in the US, and all of them would look like him. “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration,” Miller posted after Mamdani’s victory in the primary.
Would the Supreme Court let Trump do it, denaturalize a citizen for one line on a Soundcloud track? They’d let him send Seal Team Six to shoot Joe Biden in his sleep, so probably. Chief Justice John Roberts is very concerned that SCOTUS not tell the president how to do “foreign policy.”
This power has been a wish of Dear Leader’s for some time. He stuck his toe in the denaturalization waters during his first term, opening an office of the Justice Department called the Denaturalization Section in February of 2020, as the plague was raging. His first DOJ reviewed hundreds of cases, and denaturalized two former Yugolsavian citizens who allegedly lied about committing war crimes and participated in the Trusina massacre. And a new line was added in 2019 to the citizenship application: “Have you EVER committed, assisted in committing, or attempted to commit, a crime or offense for which you were NOT arrested?” opening the door to denaturalization based on fraud for any past act, even with no conviction.
Denaturalization has been a thing since the Naturalization Act of 1906, and between 1907 and 1967, there were around 22,000 denaturalizations, because the bar for stripping citizenship was low; voting in a foreign election, for instance, would do it. And the first Indian to become a citizen was denaturalized for lying about being white. Denaturalization was used against alleged “communists” during the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and after World War II, Nazis trying to hide were denaturalized.
But in 1967, in Afroyim v. Rusk, the Supreme Court decided that the government had no constitutional authority to revoke the citizenship of a native-born citizen without their consent, and left the door open to denaturalization based on fraud, which has been the case ever since. The government must show that a certificate of naturalization was “illegally procured” or procured through “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” The government must show by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence that naturalization was obtained by illegal means, concealment of a material fact, or willful misrepresentation.” And since then the government has denaturalized an average of 11 people a year, usually for big-deal things like concealing war crimes. Deporter-in-Chief Obama denaturalized eight people too, including war criminals from Rwanda, Guatemala, and Bosnia, a Nigerian marriage-scammer, and a member of the PLO.
Could Elon Musk’s face get eaten by these leopards? After all, he allegedly lied about coming to the US to study, and started a business instead of going to school.
Trump does seem to be hankering a bit for the world’s most bitter divorced dad to self-deport, as Musk has been complaining about the Big Beautiful Bill, and threatening to fund opponents to any senator who signs on (which all Republicans but three just did):
Just a month ago he was the biggest genius of all time! Also Musk had Canadian citizenship through his mother. But Trump’s gonna take a look!
So now our tinpot dictator has gifted himself a new tool to quash his perceived enemies. How, on exactly whom, he and Bondi will actually use it is for them to know and everybody else to wait nervously to find out.
If we survive this, we’ll owe each other soothing hugs and words of affirmation that all that happened, and we saw it too, and they aren’t the crazy one. Because this is all abuse.
Until then, hang on like grim death. I wish I had something better to say.
We could have had the smart, capable, sane Black lady and the compassionate guy from Minnesota. But America wanted the fascist clown show.