DOJ’s Denaturalization Machine Can Strip Your Citizenship Without a Jury
The Justice Department put out a press release last week that reads like a superhero movie poster. Seventeen naturalized citizens targeted. Sex offenders. Fraudsters. Drug traffickers. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche thumps his chest about “zero tolerance” and “steadfast leadership.” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin growls about not standing “idly by.” It’s got everything you need to feel good about the government cracking skulls.
Then you read the fine print, and your stomach drops.
Here’s what they’re not putting in the press release. The DOJ has identified 384 foreign-born Americans for citizenship revocation as a “first wave.” DHS has been ordered to refer upward of 200 denaturalization cases per month. Between 1990 and 2017, the government averaged 11 of these cases a year. Eleven. Now they want 200 a month. You don’t go from 11 a year to 2,400 a year because you suddenly found 2,389 more sex offenders. You do it because you’ve changed the definition of who deserves to keep being American.
And here’s the part that should make every single person in this country sit up straight. These are civil proceedings. That means no jury. No court-appointed lawyer if you can’t afford one. A lower burden of proof than a criminal trial. And no statute of limitations, so the government can dig through your paperwork from 1997 and build a case on a discrepancy that might have been a translator’s mistake. That actually happened. A man named Baljinder Singh lost his citizenship over a name discrepancy that could easily have resulted from a translation error. But under the “maximal enforcement” memo from June, the DOJ is instructed to pursue any case where evidence might support denaturalization, regardless of how weak or old that evidence is.
Let me ask you something. If citizenship is a fundamental right, as the Supreme Court said in Afroyim v. Rusk, then how does the government get to take it away in a proceeding where you don’t even get a lawyer?
The DOJ lost nearly 1,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to resignations and firings. So they’re farming these cases out to 39 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, many now staffed by prosecutors who’ve never touched constitutional citizenship law. They gutted their own ranks and then built a conveyor belt to strip people of the most fundamental right they have, using the leftovers to run it.
And here’s the thing you can see with your own eyes. This creates two classes of American. If you were born here, you can commit fraud, lie on every form you ever fill out, and nobody comes for your passport. But if you naturalized, you are on probation for life. Twenty million naturalized Americans now get to wonder whether a mistake on decades-old immigration paperwork could cost them everything. The government’s own press release lists the worst cases it can find, the sex offenders and the drug money launderers, because that’s the sales pitch. But the policy underneath covers 10 broad categories, including a catch-all for any case the DOJ deems “sufficiently important to pursue.” That’s not a standard. That’s a blank check.
Chief Justice Earl Warren called citizenship “the right to have rights” in 1958. The Supreme Court spent a century making sure the government couldn’t arbitrarily take it away. Now the DOJ has built a machine to do exactly that, at industrial scale, in courtrooms where the accused stands alone.
They’re not coming for the criminals. They’re coming for the category. And the category is anyone who wasn’t born here.