If you are a naturalized U.S. citizen—or have a family member or friend who is—please understand the Trump regime is now coming for them. I’m not being hyperbolic.
As part of the Trump regime’s embrace of the fascist playbook, we learned this week that Trump’s Department of Justice is now invoking a tactic from the McCarthy era of the 1950’s to silence critics. The DOJ states point blank in a new memo that they are “Prioritizing Denaturalization” of American citizens—as you can see from excerpts of the memo below:
In the past, on average of 10 to 12 people were denaturalized per year in the United States—in general for concealing prior criminal convictions in their application for citizenship. The Trump regime wants to go far beyond that.
Since the Trump regime has failed at arresting and deporting the “worst of the worst” in terms of migrants convicted of crimes, they now turn to strip people of U.S. citizenship who are not hiding but easy to locate. (In reality, less than 10% of the people Trump’s ICE has in custody committed serious crimes—while more than 75% have committed NO crimes at all.)
I spoke to my friend/fellow attorney and Substack author Qasim Rashid about this new policy. As we discussed, the DOJ memo lays out ten grounds to strip naturalized US citizens of their citizenship--from those who commit certain serious crimes to those the Trump regime claims “pose a potential danger to national security.”
Think about that last one for a second. All Trump has to do is claim a naturalized citizen poses a “potential” danger to national security —not a concrete or immediate one—and they are going to seek to strip that person’s citizenship.
Just as alarming is the tenth reason cited in the DOJ memo to denaturalize a person: “Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.” That is, too, ripe for abuse by Trump. And as Rashid noted, this process will all take place in civil court where a person has no right to counsel and the burden of proof for the Trump regime to win is much lower than criminal court.
By prioritizing denaturalization, Trump is once again embracing a tactic employed by fascists and tyrants in other nations to silence dissent. As experts note, denationalization is “a form of international repression.” For example, in Cuba, a 2024 law empowers the autocratic government to strip citizenship of any person who “acts contrary to the high political, economic and social interests” of the country. (Sounds like the DOJ memo.)
Then there is Trump’s role model Vladimir Putin who not long ago enacted a law in Russia that will strip citizenship for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine. The amendments to Russia's citizenship laws list more than 60 crimes as grounds for losing citizenship—including spreading “fake news” about Moscow's war against the Ukraine. The goal of Putin and the leader of Cuba is to silence dissent—which is exactly what Trump intends.
Now to be clear, it will still take a federal judge to order the denaturalization. That means a person is entitled to due process and a hearing—but you will have to bear the cost of a lawyer to do that.
Qasim and I also spoke about the anti-Muslim hate being spewed by the right—and even a few on the left—since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination in NYC’s mayor race. Given Qasim and I are both Muslims who have lived through these types of spikes in hate in the past, we know this will incite hate crimes against our community. But history also gives us great hope because what the bigots don’t get is that the more they try to erase us, the more people from our community who will step forward to run for office!
Hope you check out my full interview with Qasim and also please sign up for his very informative Substack!
