So, let's see if all those Dt supporters and voters
will still be singing his praise and support him when
they are going to be looking at something like
this....And of course, one will always be deemed guilty
of some perceived wrong doing....
My mother, in her last years on this Earth, was always
afraid that her naturalization would be taken away and
she would be sent back to her home country, only to be
sent off to Siberia. Maybe she was right.
"It appears that President-elect Donald Trump intends
to keep his campaign promise to begin deporting at
least 15 million people who, he claims, have been
“poisoning the blood” of our country. By at least one
estimate, it will be virtually impossible —
logistically and financially — to implement Trump’s
grandiose ambitions, but that won’t keep him from
destroying countless lives while trying.
One initiative, smaller in scale but potentially
devastating in its impact, will be aimed at immigrants
who have become naturalized U.S. citizens.
Trump has named three deportation hardliners to key
positions in his administration, including Stephen
Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, Kristi Noem
for secretary of Homeland Security and Tom Homan as
“border czar.”
Miller is likely to be especially influential and
especially brutal.
“America is for Americans only,” he shouted at Trump’s
Madison Square Garden campaign rally. In a pre-election
interview, he outlined a sweeping plan to use the
National Guard, state and local police, the Drug
Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms and even the U.S. military to round up
undocumented immigrants and detain them in tent camps
until they can be expelled.
But even “documented” immigrants will not be safe,
because Miller has declared that he will pursue the
seldom-used process of “denaturalization” to go after
people who have been citizens for years or decades,
based on suspicions about purported fraud on their
naturalization applications. Individuals stripped of
citizenship will then be subject to deportation along
with Miller’s other targets.
Not every discrepancy or inconsistency is evidence of
fraud, of course, so it is inevitable that some
legitimate citizens, or those who made minor mistakes
based on confusion, may be caught up in an overzealous
investigation.
The process for invalidating naturalization was created
by statute in 1906, providing that citizenship may be
canceled if it was obtained through false statements or
fraudulent omissions. It was used inconsistently in the
20th century, with periods of intense activity during
the World Wars and the Cold War, and much less often in
less parlous times.
By the early 21st century, denaturalization was mainly
sought for accused terrorists, war criminals and human
rights violators who had concealed their backgrounds on
their visa and citizenship applications. During the
Obama administration, for example, a successful
denaturalization case was initiated against Rasmea
Odeh, who had concealed her previous conviction for a
supermarket bombing in Israel that had killed two
university students.
During the first Trump administration, the Department
of Justice established a new denaturalization effort
called “Operation Second Look,” tasked with
investigating the citizenship of thousands of
immigrants suspected of obtaining naturalization by
fraud, misrepresentation, or deceit.
Operation Second Look hired scores of new agents,
initially more than tripling the number of active
denaturalization cases and promising many more. While
Democratic administrations had “focused on those who
have done something terrible,” the Trump investigators
appeared primed to go after “people who did nothing of
note, or whose wrong caused no harm.”
In 2017, the Supreme Court limited the government’s
ability to revoke citizenship, unanimously holding that
naturalization can only be canceled for “materially”
false statements, meaning a lie or intentional omission
that would have precluded naturalization in the first
place.
Materiality, however, is in the eye of the beholder —
or in this case of Stephen Miller, who has declared
that he will revive a “turbocharged” Operation Second
Look in 2025, consistent with his intention to strip as
many immigrants as possible of citizenship as a prelude
to deportation.
Miller’s obsessive denaturalization campaign can have
extreme consequences, and not only for those immigrants
who, rightly or wrongly, find their citizenship
challenged or canceled. Even those who successfully
defeat a denaturalization case will have been subjected
to tremendous stress.
As journalist M. Gessen explained, an expansive hunt
for invalid naturalization applications can turn
millions of naturalized citizens into second-class
citizens, by “taking away their assumption of
permanence.”
Even worse, thousands of immigrants, naturalized as
minors through a parent’s application, may have their
citizenship annulled through no fault of their own.
Perhaps worse still, if that is imaginable, many
American-born children might find their citizenship in
doubt if their parents are denaturalized, given Trump’s
pledge to end birthright citizenship for the children
of undocumented immigrants.
Fortunately, denaturalization is a judicial process,
with a right to trial in federal court. Unfortunately,
there is no right to appointed counsel in
denaturalization cases, so every accused defendant will
also bear the expense of retaining a lawyer.
For the many without funds for an attorney, there is a
significant chance of losing citizenship by mistake or
default, which may be exactly what Stephen Miller has
in mind."
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