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In the midst of President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s totalizing immigration crackdown—an effort that has come to involve agents and soldiers in full combat gear marching and riding armored vehicles through major American cities—sympathetic and often outraged U.S. citizens have seen themselves as allies and protectors who can face off against the administration’s overreaches while incurring less risk.
In recent weeks, though, that sense of being beyond the scope of immigration agents has curdled, and naturalized citizens in particular are beginning to worry that after Trump has targeted immigrants lacking legal status, temporary status holders, and permanent residents, they’re next. Last month, a memo issued by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate cited “prioritizing denaturalization” as one of five top issues for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, writing that DOJ would “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.”
A long list of potential targets had the expected inclusion of suspected gang members and fraudsters, along with the rather broad categories of people “who acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations”; those who “pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism, espionage”; and “other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
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.”
“Any omission that would not have had an impact on the citizenship application would not cut it, even if it was misrepresentation or an omission,” explained Cyrus Mehta, a prominent New York immigration lawyer who is representing Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi, another permanent resident detained by the Trump administration. That is to say, a denaturalization can move forward only if the government can establish to the satisfaction of a federal judge that there are ex ante facts that would have clearly made the person directly ineligible for citizenship in the first place.
That ex ante part is important. One fact often getting lost in the shuffle is that a naturalized citizen cannot be denaturalized for anything that happens after their naturalization. Obviously, a citizen who commits a federal crime can still be prosecuted and imprisoned for it, but their citizenship itself cannot be touched on that basis. Whatever the administration would want to trot out to target a citizen would need to have occurred during or prior to the naturalization process.
One of the easiest hooks for that is membership or support for sanctioned organizations like terrorist groups. As some observers have pointed out, denaturalization was an effective tool during the McCarthyist Red Scare, when people were targeted for membership or participation in communist groups and parties. Ogles’ letter to Bondi absurdly points to a 2017 song Mamdani produced with the lyrics “Holy Land Five / My Guys,” a reference to the dubiously convicted members of a charity, as evidence that the politician had terrorist sympathies not previously disclosed (adding, in one of the understatements of the century, “I understand that some may have First Amendment concerns”).
This is ridiculous on its face, and it would be in a legal setting. Material support must be, well, material, i.e., monetary or involving direct practical assistance or services to sanctioned entities. The communist denaturalizations were made more straightforward by the fact that membership in Communist parties is specifically mentioned as grounds for inadmissibility in immigration law (yes, still) and that those targeted had actively participated in those groups. As Mehta points out, the government has made insinuations but not actually attempted to argue in court that the pro-Palestinian activists are engaged in such support.
Mahdawi “is an activist, he was part of the campus protests, but to find material support means that there has to be a link between the terrorist organization and noncitizens whom they want to deport,” he said. “In the case of these students, even Khalil, Mahdawi, [Rumeysa] Ozturk, Badar [Khan Suri], they have not been charged with material support, and that’s because it’s harder to establish material support. Just because you’re fighting for Palestinian rights and they’re aligned with what Hamas is advocating doesn’t mean that you’re providing material support to Hamas.” If the government can’t get the smear to stick on noncitizens, it’s going to be very difficult to make that work in a federal denaturalization proceeding.
As with practically all of Trump and Miller’s immigration actions, this is best understood as at least partly a public relations exercise and an effort to engender uncertainty as a scare tactic. It’s a lesson well learned from their first time at the helm. To take just one example, during the first Trump administration, Homeland Security moved to significantly expand the circumstances under which a would-be immigrant could be denied status over so-called public charge concerns—the idea that they might become reliant on the government. This effort went through years of litigation, with injunctions and overturns, before the policy ultimately went into effect in 2020—only to quickly be blocked again as COVID-19 took hold.
In the end, there’s no evidence that anyone was ever actually denied status based exclusively on the expanded public charge definition. Nonetheless, one study found that as many as 1 in 4 adults in mixed-status households in 2022 did not participate in safety-net programs they were entitled to out of concern that doing so would affect their immigration status, well after the short-lived rule was no longer in effect. The point wasn’t necessarily for the rule change to have a significant legal impact but rather for the specter of its application to dissuade people either from applying for status in the first place or from using public benefits to which they were entitled.
All the current talk of denaturalization seems geared toward making U.S. citizens think twice before engaging in political speech or activity—that’s precisely why the effort is most individually targeted at prominent political opponents like Mamdani and, now, Elon Musk. After the Tesla CEO’s public falling-out with former best friend Trump, the president is saying he’ll “take a look” at deporting the U.S. citizen billionaire.
Being the subject of a federal civil or criminal denaturalization process in federal district court and up through whatever appeals level is inherently incredibly destabilizing, disorienting, and often expensive, even if you win. The process is a sort of punishment, which is certainly the point. So although the administration’s chances of going through with anything resembling a true mass denaturalization campaign seem extraordinarily unlikely, we should expect to see the White House wield it as a political weapon.
