Trump Is Threatening to Take Away People's Citizenship. Can He? [View all]

Source: Slate Magazine

Trump Is Threatening to Take Away People’s Citizenship. Can He?

Felipe De La Hoz
Fri, July 11, 2025 at 5:40 AM EDT
7 min read

-snip-

Those who’ve been following the administration’s crackdown immediately recognized the latter two points in particular as a catchall for people engaged in disfavored speech and political activity, like Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student, Palestinian student organizer, and green card holder detained by federal agents in March. That this effort could be used as a form of political policing was further bolstered in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, after which right-wing figures, including sitting Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, called for the naturalized New Yorker to be stripped of citizenship and deported. Ogles sent a letter to that effect to Attorney General Pam Bondi before Trump himself weighed in, musing about having Mamdani arrested.

Yet, as concerning as these developments are, actually going through with a denaturalization is a complicated and legally fraught process. Everyone else who has migrated here—from immigrants lacking legal status to full permanent residents—can be put through the administrative immigration court system, which itself exists within the DOJ and under the control of Trump’s handpicked leader, Bondi. It is this lack of judicial independence that has enabled Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutors and immigration judges to collude to dismiss active asylum cases for the agency to be able to arrest people attending their own immigration hearings.

That is not the case for naturalized citizens, though. The immigration courts have no jurisdiction over U.S. citizens, so the only way for the administration to attempt to strip citizenship is to go through the actual federal judiciary, which is far more independent and much less likely to look favorably upon efforts to target the relatively ironclad protections of citizenship. The government can attempt either a civil or criminal denaturalization, with the latter alleging that the naturalization itself was obtained through criminal means. Despite the Supreme Court’s recent kowtowing to the more authoritarian aspects of Trump’s agenda, in the unanimous 2017 decision in Maslenjak v. United States, the court ruled that the government could not strip citizenship from a woman who had lied about her husband having served in the Bosnian Serb army because the denaturalization statute “demands a causal or means-end connection between a legal violation and naturalization.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/could-trump-actually-deport-elon-094000717.html