Trump plans to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens

President-elect Donald Trump appears set to make good on his campaign promise to begin deporting at least 15 million people he claims are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

By at least one estimate, Trump’s ambitions would be nearly impossible — logistically and financially — to carry out, but that won’t stop him from “destroying countless lives” in the attempt.

One initiative, smaller in scale but potentially devastating in its impact, would be aimed at immigrants who have become naturalized U.S. citizens, said Steven Lubet, author of “Formal Trials Return: How a Palestinian Fighter Gained and Lost American Citizenship.”

Trump has appointed three deportation hardliners to key positions in his administration, including Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, Kristi Noem as secretary of homeland security, and Tom Homan as “border czar.”

Miller is likely to be particularly poignant and brutal.

At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, Miller shouted, “America is for Americans only.” In an interview before the election, Miller laid out 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 illegal immigrants and detain them in tent camps until they could be deported.

But even “documented” immigrants won’t be safe, because Miller has announced that he will continue the rarely used “denaturalization” process to go after people who have been citizens for years or decades, based on suspicions of alleged fraud in their naturalization applications. Individuals stripped of citizenship will be subject to deportation along with Miller’s other targets.

Lubet, a professor emeritus at the Williams Memorial Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, warned that the Trump administration could exploit many mistakes by legitimate citizens, or those who made simple mistakes based on confusion.

“The citizenship revocation process was created by a 1906 law, which provides that citizenship can be revoked if it was obtained through false statements or fraudulent omissions. The process has been used inconsistently in the 20th century, with periods of intense activity during the two world wars and the Cold War, and much less so in less threatening times,” he added.

By the early 21st century, the denaturalization of suspected terrorists, war criminals, and human rights violators who concealed their backgrounds on visa and citizenship applications was common. During the Barack Obama administration, for example, a successful case was brought to strip the citizenship of Rasmea Odeh, who concealed her prior conviction for bombing a supermarket in Israel that killed two college students.

During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department created a new denaturalization effort called Operation Second Look, tasked with investigating the citizenship of thousands of immigrants suspected of obtaining citizenship through fraud, forgery or deception.

The Second Look operation has hired dozens of new agents, initially more than tripling the number of active denaturalization cases and promising more. While Democratic administrations have focused on “those who did something terrible,” Trump’s investigators have seemed ready to go after “people who did nothing, or whose wrongdoing caused no harm.”