I grew up in a home of immigrants from Colombia, Cuba and Peru, and ours was a mixed-status family. Some family members became naturalized citizens thanks to legislation for refugees. Others, such as my mother, were sponsored by spouses. Some, like me, were born here.
We thought — and media confirmed — that once it was acquired, citizenship was for life. But that’s no longer the case. The Department of Justice recently announced that it would be in court to strip a dozen naturalized Americans of their citizenship, and The New York Times reported that the Justice Department is directing regular prosecutors to target as many as 384 naturalized Americans. For comparison, since 2017, the Justice Department has moved to denaturalize at least 120 people. This means that the citizenship status of 26 million naturalized Americans in this country is no longer guaranteed.
Americans are generally only in danger of losing their citizenship if they are found guilty of committing fraud on their naturalization applications, but in January, President Donald Trump told reporters that his administration was considering another factor: their countries of origin. This already seemed to be the case during his first presidency. The journalist Seth Freed Wessler found that people from Yemen, Somalia and Iran make up only about 1% of the foreign-born population in the United States, but they were about 10% of the citizens the Trump administration tried to denaturalize in 2017 and 2018. Trump has also identified the predominantly white countries from which he would like the United States to welcome immigrants: Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
During his first administration, Trump created the Denaturalization Section as part of the Justice Department. In 2020, while we hunkered down at home in fear of COVID-19, multiple federal agencies busied themselves sending the new unit the names of more than 500 people who could be investigated for citizenship fraud. Most infamously, Trump’s administration tried to strip a grandmother of her citizenship. Norma Borgoño had been naturalized for more than a decade and had been living in the country since 1989. Trump wanted to denaturalize her because she had been convicted of a white-collar crime years after becoming a citizen. The Justice Department eventually dropped the case, but the point was clear: No one was safe from scrutiny.
If citizenship can be taken away, was it ever real?
I spent years researching the history of citizenship and my family’s journey in this country, and I’ve come to appreciate that many of us think of citizenship as a straightforward legal status along the lines of “you either are a citizen or you’re not.” But citizenship has never functioned in such a simple way.
In fact, citizenship has been changed many times over since the founding of the country. In 1790, Congress passed a federal law so that only free white immigrants could naturalize as citizens. The Civil War led to the recognition of Black Americans as citizens, but that status did not stop discrimination in voting, housing, education or healthcare until the Civil Rights Movement. In the early 1900s, American women could lose their citizenship if they married Asian men who were not eligible to naturalize as citizens — a part of the government’s many attempts to maintain the United States as a white Christian nation. In the 1930s, Mexican American citizens were deported from the United States as part of a program that led to the expulsion of about 1 million Mexicans.
More than 50 years later, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation granting 3 million immigrants, mostly Mexican, a pathway to citizenship.
With the Trump administration, we are not facing a new story about citizenship; we are facing a return to this country’s history of it, and it’s not just the work of one political party. Joe Biden could have shut down the Justice Department’s Denaturalization Section when he took the White House but didn’t. He simply renamed it the “Enforcement Unit.” He accepted the premise that the United States government should continue stripping people of their citizenship.
In the coming weeks and months, we will need to take to social media and the streets to remind prosecutors for the Justice Department, as well as the judges who will hear these cases, that they do not have to obey orders motivated by racial bias rather than facts. Because these are civil proceedings and targeted Americans will not have assigned lawyers, we will need to spend our money and time on legal organizations that will step up to defend these Americans.
And wherever we find ourselves — at work, family gatherings or Little League games — we need to remind each other that the Americans being targeted are more than citizens. They are our neighbors.
Daisy Hernández is the author of “Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth” and an associate professor in the English department at Northwestern University.
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