“Ppl aren't focused enough on the word “denaturalize” here. The Pres says:🚨he’ll revoke the #citizenship of Americans who weren't born here if he & S Miller det/decide they need to go.
#Denaturalization is a rare & legally difficult process that Miller & white nationalists like N Fuentes have been pushing to "supercharge" the proc for yrs now.
Trump🚨makes clear by citing: 53M *incls fgn-born CITIZENS -any American who wasn't born here is now-at risk of dep-.”
-J Favreau
#Deportations #USPol
Stand up against Republican racist attacks on Asian Americans' rights
https://thedemlabs.org/2025/08/10/republican-racist-attacks-on-asian-americans-asian-law-caucus-fights-back/
#birthright #denaturalization
Stand up against Republican racist attacks on Asian Americans' rights
https://thedemlabs.org/2025/08/10/republican-racist-attacks-on-asian-americans-asian-law-caucus-fights-back/
#birthright #denaturalization
> ...under President Donald Trump's administration something as mundane as under-reporting income on a tax return could mean you are no longer a US citizen.
>
> [The DOJ has] made denaturalization one of five enforcement priorities for the agency’s Civil Division. The unit will now look at individuals in any of 10 priority areas, along with the catch-all of “any other cases” the agency determines “sufficiently important to pursue.”
NBC NEWS: Calls to strip #Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship spark alarm about #DonaldTrump weaponizing #Denaturalization….
Past administrations, including #BarackObama's, have sought to #Denaturalize U.S. citizens, such as #Terrorists and #Nazis. But advocates worry #Trump could target political opponents...
At this point if you cannot see that the Trumpenreich is actively engineering the conditions necessary for a fascist genocide of migrants and a massive ethnic cleansing project against brown people to create a white ethnostate, I need to ask if you've been living in a cave for the past six months. With recent news that the Trump administration is looking to fire up a mass denaturalization program, we are now in the process of both expanding the ethnic cleansing project to include American citizens and establishing the kind of stateless people fascist regimes are able to exterminate in unfathomable numbers. This isn't a debate anymore, and we're running out of time to stop this nightmare - mass graves are on the horizon.
https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/16/ominous-solutions-to-nonexistent-problems/
Ominous “Solutions” to Nonexistent Problems
"Folks, if this doesn’t terrify you I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention to the nightmare unfolding around us in Trump’s brave new Amerikkka. Historically, denaturalization policies have lead to some of the worst atrocities in Pig Empire history, including, you guessed it, the actual fucking Holocaust. If that sounds like scaremongering to you please let me remind you that we are currently bragging about building a concentration camp surrounded by migrant-eating alligators, and the Supreme Court has more or less signaled its willingness to let the Trump regime at least temporarily ignore the constitution to commit life-destroying human rights violations against non-citizens. How much longer do you think it’s going to take these fascist pigs to figure out that deportation flights are more expensive than bullets, or even just letting underfed people die in remote internment camps, far away from the public eye? We are through the looking glass now, and waiting until we’re finding mass graves outside of ICE facilities to recognize a rapidly escalating ethnonationalist genocide being conducted under the guise of immigration enforcement is an unacceptable course of action."
#Fascism #Trump #DOJ #MassDeportations #PamBondi #EthnicCleansing #Denaturalization #Ethnonationalism #Nazis #Genocide #WhiteSupremacy
(NIDC original post)
The velocity of the “bad sh*t” #trump would attempt…
The creative cruelty…is dizzying.
Now it’s stripping citizenship from folks he dislikes.
“The 🤡admin 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 Attny & the legal bar for the admin to prove that a citizen did something to warrant denaturalization is lower than it would be in criminal court.”
In his all-out-war on illegal immigration, Trump has branded #immigrants as “criminals,” “invaders”... as his admin targets millions of Haitians, Latin Americans, gang members & foreign college students for deportation.
He's🚨directed the #DOJ to use its resources in a crackdown on naturalized citizens suspected of unlawfully obtaining their US citizenship +on others who may have committed a crime after becoming citizens...
#Denaturalization #Deportations #DHS #ICE #USPol https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article309926220.html
🚨 PURE FASCISM ALERT 🚨
If Trump gets his way, thousands of naturalized citizens could be stripped of their citizenship based on nothing more than a suspicion. No evidence.
Sound familiar? It should — this is McCarthyism on steroids.
And it’s already happening. DoJ lawyers have been ordered to start the purge immediately.
This isn't immigration policy.
It's ethnic cleansing in a suit.
#Denaturalization #Authoritarianism #TrumpRegime #Resist #FascismWatch
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/politics/justice-department-trump-denaturalization
#TrumpRegime #fascists #denaturalization
"Former president Joe Biden put Rosenbaum over a DOJ team investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine, but the Trump administration pulled that effort in what Rosenbaun described as 'a very disturbing retreat from the U.S. commitment to holding accountable the perpetrators of war crimes and aggression.'
Now Trump seeks to use Rosenbaum’s greatest weapon to target immigrants by re-defining the statute phrase 'pose a potential danger to national security'.
(. . .)
Hofstra University law professor Irina Manta said the administration’s tactic could have a 'chilling effect' on free speech, both political and otherwise.
CNN reports Trump MAGA ally Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn) is already asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether New York City Democratic mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani—who was born in Uganda and naturalized in 2018— should be subject to denaturalization proceedings."
https://www.alternet.org/trump-targets-students-immigration/
#TrumpRegime #fascists #denaturalization
"Trump administration wants to expand anti-Nazi law to target critics: report
Based upon a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, Donald Trump's administration wants to ramp up efforts to purge the country not only of undocumented immigrants but also naturalized citizens.
CNN is reporting that the president's DOJ has been examining ways to expand the scope of a law that will allow them to target a much broader swath of individuals – anyone who may 'pose a potential danger to national security.'
At the center of the argument is a seldom-used law that allowed the DOJ 'to deport hundreds of people who assisted the Nazis' who hid their involvement.
Based upon a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, Donald Trump's administration wants to ramp up efforts to purge the country not only of undocumented immigrants but also naturalized citizens.
(. . .)
That led Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, to warn, "The politicization of citizenship rights is something that really worries me, I think it’s just flatly inconsistent with our democratic system," because it can be used to target critics of the president.
The report adds, ... current and former DOJ officials who spoke to CNN said that the beyond instructing lawyers to file as many denaturalization cases as possible, the memo is so broad that it could allow the Justice Department to invoke vague or unsubstantiated claims to expel people from the country.'"
"For decades, the US Department of Justice has used a tool to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens: a law that allowed the department to denaturalize, or strip, citizenship from criminals who falsified their records or hid their illicit pasts.
That power, under the new Trump administration, may be broadening.
According to a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, attorneys should aim their denaturalization work to target a much broader swath of individuals – anyone who may 'pose a potential danger to national security.'
The directive appears to be a push towards a larger denaturalization effort that fits with the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. These could leave some of the millions of naturalized American citizens at risk of losing their status and being deported."
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/politics/justice-department-trump-denaturalization
@TheDailyEdge AFAICT none of the folks subject to #ForcedDisappearance by #AmericanGestapo aka. #ICE and put into #ConcentrationCamps like #CECOT have been subject to #denaturalization of even qualified for being denaturalized against their explicit wish.
#USpol #Trump #Exiles #racism #facism #Amerikkka #christofacism #AmericanStasi #disappearance #disappeared
Trump🚨is "prioritizing" stripping #citizenship from naturalized citizens who engage in any conduct Trump disproves of (like Putin).
The #DOJ is invoking a tactic from the 1950’s. In a memo: “Prioritizing #Denaturalization” of US citizens: “Any other cases ref to the Civil Div that the Div determines to be sufficiently impt to pursue.” Ripe for abuse by Trump *no right to counsel -burden of proof for the #TrumpRegime to win: much lower in civil ct than criminal ct.
#USPol https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/attorney-qasim-rashid-on-trumps-plan
«Last month…Justice Department ordered its attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings…against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security.”»
#mamdani #denaturalization #nyc https://open.substack.com/pub/kenklippenstein/p/trumps-threat-to-deport-mamdani-isnt
What to know about the DOJ revoking citizenship of naturalized Americans
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/30/trump-naturalized-citizenship-doj-immigration #Denaturalization
:Trump was asked what he would do in response to Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to not allow ICE to arrest “criminal aliens” in New York City. Trump responded, 'Well, then, we’ll have to arrest him.' He added, 'Look, we don’t need a communist in this country,' then threatened Mamdani directly. 'A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re gonna look at everything.'”
#Trump #Republicans #BigBeautifulBill #AlligatorAlcatraz #denaturalization #ZohranMamdani
/24
"It’s so named because of the dangerous alligators, crocodiles and pythons in the wetlands around it, which are intended to terrify detainees and deter their escape.
Third, at a press conference yesterday, Trump signaled his intent to weaponize denaturalization of U.S. citizens."
#Trump #Republicans #BigBeautifulBill #EconomicElites #TaxCuts #immigrants #prisons #deportations #AlligatorAlcatraz #denaturalization #ZohranMamdani
/23
Wednesday Reads: Trump’s Nightmare Bill and the Coming Concentration Camps
Good Afternoon!!
The House is planning to vote on the Senate version of Trump’s spending and tax cut bill today. The Senate version is very different from the one the House originally sent them, so it’s not clear whether the bill will make it to Trump’s desk by July 4, as he has demanded.
As we all know, the bill will take away health care and food assistance from millions of Americans. Trump’s big bill will also vastly expand his power to target people he wants to make disappear. Yesterday Trump openly approved a true concentration camp in our country. I still haven’t recovered from the shock of seeing what these fascists are planning. And now Trump is talking about deporting U.S. citizens. The bill is cruel in so many ways, but mass deportation is Trump’s number 1 goal. I’m going to focus on that in this post.
Trump’s Nightmare Bill
Jonathan Cohn at The Bulwark: An Ignominious Bill Passed By an Inglorious Body.
….THE LEGISLATION SENATE REPUBLICANS passed on Tuesday is probably going to kill a lot of people.
It sounds stark when you put it that way, but death is a stark thing. It’s also what can be reasonably expected from the GOP legislation, especially the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act projected to leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured.
When people can’t pay for medical care they frequently don’t get it. And when people don’t get medical care, they’re more likely to die early from a preventable condition. That’s what you’ll find if you read the latest research, and what you’ll learn if you ask people working on the front lines of medical care.
And death doesn’t even capture the full impact of the bill, which thanks to Tuesday’s vote seems likely to become law.
That outcome is not yet a foregone conclusion, to be clear. The bill requires approval from the House, where a different version passed in May and where several Republicans have already said they object to the Senate’s iteration.
But while those Republicans have enough leverage to block approval, forcing some kind of negotiation between the houses, they are already under enormous pressure from party leaders—and, especially, from President Donald Trump, who has said he wants a bill on his desk by July 4….
Politically, it was a savvy strategy for avoiding scrutiny. So was packaging the entirety of the Trump domestic agenda into one legislative package, making it difficult for opponents to focus—and rally supporters around—any one part.
As of a few days ago, nearly half of America hadn’t heard anything about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” according to Democratic polling from Priorities USA. And only 8 percent had heard it included Medicaid cuts….
But in trying so hard to shield the bill’s true nature from the public, Republican leaders may have also succeeded in hiding parts from their own members, who might not appreciate just how much some features of the bill undercut supposedly cherished MAGA goals like lowering the cost of living and making U.S. industry more competitive.
And that’s to say nothing about the disproportionate effects some elements of the bill will have on their own constituents.
We know about the health care and food assistance cuts; Cohn lists examples of other disastrous cuts in the bill:
YOU CAN SEE IT CLEARLY in the provisions yanking away Biden-era subsidies for clean energy and electric vehicles, in many cases quickly. (The tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles would end in September.) It’s a way to own the libs, now that Trump has turned clean energy into almost as much a bogeyman as trans athletes and woke professors.
Speaker Johnson touts the big ugly bill.
But Biden’s subsidies unleashed a factory-building boom that the legislation will weaken and maybe kill, which is why the bluest of blue-collar unions—electrical workers, building trades, iron workers—spent the last few days blasting the bill as a historic “job killer.” And those jobs are likely to have an outsized effect on red states like Texas, now America’s capital for solar-panel manufacturing, because that’s where a disproportionate share of the subsidies went.
And that’s just the immediate effect. Giving up support for wind and solar means giving up on the easiest, cheapest way to increase generating capacity right now—something tech executives desperately tried to convey to Trump and his allies, with a warning that it will set back U.S. firms in their quest to develop artificial intelligence. That’s on top of ceding industries like battery storage and electric vehicles to competitors, especially the one Trump brings up the most: China.
Look down the road and you’ll see an America that is more reliant on other countries for energy—and, most likely, paying a lot more than it would if it had spent the next few years keeping up in the global alternative-energy race. Americans can expect an extra $170 billion in annual energy bills between now and 2034, according to a projection by the firm Energy Innovation.
Please read the rest of this piece at the link. It’s an excellent summary of what the bill will do to our country.
Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: The bottom line: The bill is cruel. Republicans don’t care about hurting people.
Senate Republicans certainly lack spine. They are deathly afraid to cross Donald Trump, to put their cushy jobs at risk by provoking a primary challenge, to fall out of favor with the maliciously dishonest right-wing media, and/or to be ostracized from their close circle of sycophants, donors, and staff. But their greatest moral failure is arguably not lack of courage but rather lack of empathy. They simply do not care about the pain they are inflicting on others.
Senate and House Republicans know what this bill does. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and others can repeat the lie that no one will lose coverage, but it does not make it so. Seventeen million people will lose health care (including 11 million Medicaid beneficiaries). Millions will lose food assistance. The debt will grow by over $3 trillion. It is hard to find anyone outside the MAGA cult who thinks this will benefit America. Republicans respond by lying about the bill even when confronted with the misery their handiwork will cause.
“The facts matter. The people matter. The Senate’s Medicaid approach breaks promises and will kick people off of Medicaid who truly need it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said on the floor, finally freed to speak honestly after announcing he would not seek reelection. His fellow Republicans shrugged. They heard the same litany of horrors from constituents, hospitals, doctors, state officials, and even right-wing think tanks.
Republicans still cannot imagine if they or a loved one:
- Could not get food because their application for food stamps was snarled in red tape designed to kick people off benefits to which they were entitled;
- Could not get preventive care, addiction treatment, nursing home care, or prescription drugs because they have been kicked off Medicaid and priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges;
- Could not get to a rural hospital in an emergency after the local one closed;
- Could not find a cancer trial after cuts to the National Institutes of Health;
- Could not get care from Veterans Affairs.
Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them “rats” or “vermin” or “murderers.”
Click the link to read the rest.
Trump’s Deportation Goals and Alligator Alcatraz
The bill provides massive amount of money for immigration enforcement. William Kristol at The Bulwark: How to Turn the U.S. Into an Immigration Police State in One Big Bill.
In addition to cutting health care for the poor and providing tax relief for the rich, the legislation provided massive funding increases for the federal agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsession. The bill adds a total of $170.7 billion to immigration enforcement. It roughly triples the annual detention and enforcement budgets for the masked men of Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the next four years.
And according to our vice president, JD Vance, this was the point of it all: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDSAFP via Getty Imag
All those people losing health insurance? “Minutiae.” “Immaterial.” Mass detention and deportation are what matters. They’re not only key to Making America Great Again, they’re what it means to Make America Great Again. That’s the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those foreigners seeking refuge and opportunity here, in our land.
And mass detention and deportation are also key to advancing the other point of it all: authoritarianism. That’s the other part of the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those annoying features of due process and the rule of law, all those restraints of civility and decency, that have kept us from doing what we want.
And so, while his vice president was breaking the tied vote in the Senate, Donald Trump was celebrating a new detention facility in the Florida Everglades. It’s a physical manifestation and apt symbol of the MAGA dream. How proud they all were of its clever name—“Alligator Alcatraz”—and the collection of tents filled with cages to hold immigrants.
Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic: The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp.
What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, said on Tuesday.
That morning, Trump attended the camp’s opening in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “We’d like to see them in many states,” Trump said at a press conference there. “And at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.” He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented his team, who “did this in less than a week.”
For the event, Trump wore one of his signature red ball caps, this one reading “Gulf of America,” his jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a white “Make America Great Again” ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. “They’re going to sweep this six times to make sure there’s nothing that could be used as contraband, as weapons,” DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, “before the detainees come in.” He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their prisoners would “check in.”
The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a few miles from the camp’s entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site. “People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,” Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s a big deal. Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it’s a vast wasteland. It’s not.”
The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, “a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,” according to The Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.
Read the rest at TNR.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Trump Launches America’s Newest Concentration Camp, Complete With Tacky Merch.
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
Trump and Noem touring Alligator Alcatraz
But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.
The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.
These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
For more details on the new concentration camp, read this very good article by Chelsea Bailey and Isabel Rosales at CNN: ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: What to know about Florida’s new controversial migrant detention facility.
Analysis by Robert Tait at The Guardian: Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ tour was a calculated celebration of the dystopian.
Donald Trump’s tour of the bloodcurdlingly-monikered – and hastily-constructed – “Alligator Alcatraz” migrants detention center in Florida’s Everglades had the hallmarks of a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian.
Accompanied by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and a phalanx of journalists, the US president saw only virtue in the vista of mesh fencing, barbed wire and forbidding steel bunk beds.
“Between Kristi and Ron, it’s really government working together,” he said. “They have done an amazing job. I’m proud of them.”
Not that Trump was blind to the intimidating nature of the facility his long crusade against undocumented people had willed into existence in this hot, steamy part of southern Florida, prized by environmentalists as a crucial nature preserve but now redesigned to be a location of dread to those lacking documentary proof of their right to be in the US….
Trump seemed to revel in the potential for detainees’ misery at what was termed a round-table discussion but which devolved into fawning praise of his leadership from administration and state officials and obsequious questions from journalists representing friendly rightwing news outlets.
“It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site,” he said. “That’s a spooky one too, isn’t it? That’s a tough site.”
“Our superstar”
As if in confirmation that this was an event designed to showcase ruthlessness, Trump handed the floor to Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and widely-acknowledged mastermind of the anti-immigrant offensive, calling him “our superstar”.
Miller responded with a pithy summation of the policy’s raison d’être.
White House aide believes it’s more “dehumanizing” to let migrants into the country than it is to detain them in a camp surrounded by man-eating alligators.
“What you’ve done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,” he said. “There’s a 2,000 mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America.
“There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.”
And there would be more to come – courtesy of funds secured for deportations in Trump’s sweeping spending bill, which secured narrow Senate passage during Trump’s visit to the facility.
“Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,” Miller said.
Read the whole thing at The Guardian.
Yesterday in Florida, Trump again talked about deporting U.S. citizens. José Olivares at The Guardian: Trump seizes on ‘moral character’ loophole as way to revoke citizenship.
A justice department memo directing the department’s civil division to target the denaturalization of US citizens around the country has opened up an new avenue for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, experts say.
In the US, when a person is denaturalized, they return to the status they held before becoming a citizen. If someone was previously a permanent resident, for example, they will be classified as such again, which can open the door to deportation efforts.
The memo, published on 11 June, instructed the justice department’s civil division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”. Immigration matters are civil matters, meaning that immigrants – whether they are naturalized citizens or not – do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.
Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan thinktank, explained that much of immigration law was based on discretion by government officials. To revoke a person’s citizenship, US officials must demonstrate that they are not of “good moral character” – a subjective and broad term with little defined parameters.
Now, the recent memo lists a broad range of categories of people who should be stripped of their naturalized citizenship status, providing further guidance as to who is not of good “moral character”. This included “those with a nexus to terrorism” and espionage, war criminals and those who were found to have lied in their naturalization process. Officials still need to prove their case, Chisthi explained.
“[The administration] can’t, on their own, denaturalize people, they still have to go to a federal district court,” said Chisthi. “Denaturalization finally does belong to federal district courts – but they are obviously keen on finding every way they can to denaturalize people they think did not deserve to be naturalized.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump sycophant
A bit more:
However, the justice department’s memo is not solely confined to those expanded categories. It gives more discretion to officials to pursue these cases, prompting a fear for analysts and attorneys that the directive by the Trump administration is overly broad.
For Jorge Loweree, director of policy for the American Immigration Council, a new category in the memo stood out to him: individuals accused of being gang and cartel members.
Loweree is concerned “because of the way that the administration has treated people that it deems to be gang members”, he said. “ It wasn’t that long ago that the administration flew hundreds of people from the US to a prison in El Salvador on, in most instances, flimsy evidence.”
Although the memo marks an escalation by the Trump administration it is not entirely news, and in recent decades, other nations have also engaged in seeking to strip citizenship from certain people.
Denaturalization in the US has a long history. Throughout the 20th century, those seen by the US government as potential enemies to US interests were stripped of their citizenship. Journalists, activists and labor leaders, accused of being anarchists and communists, were frequently targeted.
I could go on like this for much longer, but this post is long enough. Suffice it to say that we are in big trouble as country. Please take care today. This is all so terrifying.
#AlligatorAlcatraz #concentrationCamps #denaturalization #DonaldTrump #immigration #KiristiNoem #massDeportation #StephenMiller #TrumpSBigBeautifulBill
