How the Trump administration can strip citizenship from Americans

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Donald Trump has made it clear that he would like to strip Americans of their citizenship — and his loyalists at the Justice Department have now been given new tools to do so.

A June 11 memo to all employees of the Justice Department’s Civil Division advises attorneys and staff to begin prioritizing “denaturalization” proceedings for several categories of naturalized citizens, which is just a more complicated way of saying Americans. Most disturbingly, the memo provides the government with the ability to strip citizenship away from virtually anyone it feels like.

While the directive currently only applies to immigrants who have become citizens through the naturalization process, it isn’t difficult to imagine how easily this can — and likely will — creep toward efforts to strip citizenship away from natural born Americans.

This writing has been on the wall for years. For all of our history, a key plank of American conservatism has been to establish rules about who actually gets to call themselves Americans. You see this in the culture wars — “real” Americans are the folks sitting at diners in the Midwest, being interviewed during an election year on Fox & Friends. Everyone else — like people who live in large cities — are to be considered part of an un-American insurgency. Obviously, the biggest determining factor of who gets to be American has to do with the color of your skin. Second to that is your politics: liberalism is not just un-American but anti-American. Over my lifetime I’ve watched as Republican politicians and their media allies have achieved great success in making “liberal” a dirty word, and making “conservative” synonymous with patriotism.

What the June 11 memo from the Justice Department’s Civil Division makes clear is that any pretense of Trump’s mass deportation operation being directed at “criminal illegal immigrants” is just that — a fake-out, an excuse to expand the practice of determining who gets to be here based not on criminality but on an entirely different set of parameters that are defined by people like Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and whomever has the most highly-rated show on Fox News at any given moment.

That’s because the memo gives wide leverage for Justice Department lawyers and staff to initiate denaturalization proceedings. There is of course some language about how the government should focus on stripping citizenship away from objectively bad people like terrorists, sex offenders and violent criminals. But the memo makes clear that the Justice Department has carte blanche to denaturalize virtually anyone it wants, for virtually any reason government lawyers can come up with.

These reasons include stripping citizenship from anyone who poses a “potential” danger to national security or are somehow involved in a “nexus” to terrorism. You can see how quickly this can — and almost surely will — be abused by Trump loyalists within the Justice Department.

The memo also orders the Justice Department to pursue denaturalization of anyone who has “acquired naturalization through fraud,” which could apply to transgendered people — a new piece of evidence in growing suspicions among trans Americans that the Trump administration is effectively trying to criminalize being trans.

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Beyond this already-vague language, the memo directs Justice Department attorneys to pursue denaturalization proceedings against anyone with “pending criminal charges,” even “if those charges do not fit” in categories of immigrants like those who have committed violent crimes. Government attorneys can also strip citizenship from anyone it “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,” the memo reads, in part. “Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.”

In other words: denaturalize anyone you want.

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Stripping away citizenship of Trump critics

With a vengeful strongman at the helm, this is going to get out of hand quickly. In fact it already has. We only need to look at the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Reyna Ozturk, two university students who spoke out against the war in Gaza and who were subsequently black-bagged by immigration agents before being ordered released by judges.

Marco Rubio’s State Department led those efforts, which were likely unconstitutional. Threats — both carried out and implied — to detain, deport or denaturalize anyone Donald Trump simply doesn’t like are right at home in the American right’s forever war of determining who is a loyal American and who is not (the constitution be damned). The difference now is, the president and those behind him wielding the logistical power of government agencies like the DOJ, people like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, are actually putting policies in place that will bring Trump’s authoritarian dreams into the realm of reality.

This includes masked cops on American streets, terrorizing immigrant communities and detaining them at will, as well as new facilities to hold scores of migrants as part of Trump’s mass deportation initiative. It also includes people like Rep. Andy Ogles asking the Justice Department to explore denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani. In just the last 24 hours, Trump has glommed onto this idea, rolling out a Trumpian classic of those ever-helpful but always-anonymous “people” who tell him things. In this case, those “people are saying he’s here illegally.”

Trump’s vague threat to deport Mamdani came during a visit to a new immigration detention facility in Florida, where he once again mused about deporting Americans who have been convicted of crimes — just another group of citizens he would like to remove from the country.

As of the June 11 DOJ memo, the Trump administration’s efforts to decide who is American and who is not also include the memo’s broad directive to strip citizenship away from pretty much anyone, for pretty much any reason. I imagine this includes criticizing Trump himself — an offense that several tourists and others traveling to the U.S. have said resulted in their detention and denial of entry.

But for me, one of the most eye-raising parts of the memo comes in the ninth category of immigrants whose denaturalization should be prioritized by the government — those who have “acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentation.”

This broad language could be applied to lots of classes of naturalized citizens, including the trans community.

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Targeting trans immigrants

First, “government corruption” is extremely broad. If I had to guess, I’d say that this will be applied to asylum-seekers who were granted temporary or other protective status during the Biden administration — which government lawyers under Trump will claim improperly granted asylum to immigrants as part of a “corrupt” scheme to import Democratic voters. (This argument has been made by Trump and many, many others for years now, but it’s not hard to imagine it being made in court in order to support the administration's efforts to continue removing asylum-seekers.)

But what to make of immigrants who were naturalized through “fraud or material misrepresentation?” Thankfully, we have a State Department cable (above) from February to shed some light on what that could mean. Under the guise of transgendered people seeking to enter the country for sporting competitions, the cable provides direction on how to deny them entry.

The cable says that any immigrant or traveler whose self-identified sex doesn’t match their sex at birth on government documents like passports is making a “misrepresentation,” and should therefore be denied entry into the United States. Trans advocates have told me they believe this is an important and troubling step toward charging trans immigrants and even trans citizens with fraud for “misrepresenting” their sex.

If that’s the case, the June 11 Justice Department memo would allow government lawyers to strip citizenship away from trans people whose current sex does not match their sex at birth, as defined on government documents.

Hanging over all of this is the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship, which allowed the Trump administration to continue to pursue undoing a law that provides citizenship for anyone born in the United States. If birthright citizenship is done away with, does that mean even those of us who were born here will have to go through some new, yet-to-be contrived naturalization process? If that’s the case, the June 11 Justice Department memo makes clear that the government has the discretion to deny citizenship — or take it away — from virtually anyone they like.

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