Wandering Monk
Well-Known Member
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.