Trump’s Quixotic Push to Denaturalize U.S. Citizens

While the push is another example of the administration’s anti-immigrant animus, it does not have a free hand to kick masses of naturalized citizens out of the country.

Every few months, the Trump administration says that it will make a greater effort to denaturalize American citizens. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department plans to start the process for formally denaturalizing more than 300 current U.S. citizens, which would be the largest single push for citizenship stripping in modern American history.

Any attack on the integrity of American citizenship is concerning. The administration’s denaturalization threats often provoke a strong response from the president’s opponents and critics. But it is also important to calibrate one’s level of concern by understanding what the Trump administration can and can’t do about denaturalization in the first place.

For one thing, the Trump administration cannot denaturalize a natural-born citizen—that is, someone who acquired citizenship at birth by virtue of being born on U.S. soil or by being born to a U.S. citizen. The Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, which was enacted during Reconstruction in 1869, sought to place the scope of American citizenship beyond the limits of normal political debate for all time. (I’ll come back to this to discuss Trump’s recent attacks on birthright citizenship later.)

Second, there are strict legal and constitutional limits on when and how the United States can denaturalize a naturalized U.S. citizen. This was not always the case. During the first Red Scare in the late 1910s, for example, the Wilson administration targeted Russian American anarchist activist Emma Goldman for her antiwar and anti-conscription efforts. Federal officials invalidated her husband’s naturalized citizenship for alleged fraud, then argued that her acquisition of citizenship through marriage to him was now invalid as well. She accepted deportation to the newly founded Soviet Union in 1919.

In the late 1930s, Congress and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration sought to clarify when and how someone could lose their U.S. citizenship. The Nationality Act of 1940 was drafted to harmonize dozens of different provisions that had been enacted piecemeal over the preceding decades. In the new law, Congress laid out a variety of circumstances in which a U.S. citizen could be deemed to have renounced their U.S. citizenship. The Supreme Court later summarized those conditions as follows:

The chapter relating to “Loss of Nationality” provided that any citizen should “lose his nationality” by becoming naturalized in a foreign country; taking an oath of allegiance to a foreign state; entering or serving in the armed forces of a foreign state; being employed by a foreign government in a post for which only nationals of that country are eligible; voting in a foreign political election or plebiscite; using a passport of a foreign state as a national thereof; formally renouncing American citizenship before a consular officer abroad; deserting the armed forces of the United States in wartime (upon conviction by court martial); if a naturalized citizen, residing in the state of his former nationality or birth for two years if he thereby acquires the nationality of that state; or, if a naturalized citizen, residing in the state of his former nationality or birth for three years.

The chapter relating to “Loss of Nationality” provided that any citizen should “lose his nationality” by becoming naturalized in a foreign country; taking an oath of allegiance to a foreign state; entering or serving in the armed forces of a foreign state; being employed by a foreign government in a post for which only nationals of that country are eligible; voting in a foreign political election or plebiscite; using a passport of a foreign state as a........

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