Citizenship on Trial: The Quiet Expansion of a Dangerous Power
How Denaturalization Is Being Recast as a Tool of Political Control
There is a story about citizenship and free speech unfolding quietly, largely overlooked by the press, but it should alarm us all.
On June 11, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo that escaped public notice. Yet it marked a major shift in what it means to be a citizen in this country.
Signed by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, the directive reclassifies denaturalization—the legal revocation of U.S. citizenship—as one of the Civil Division’s top five priorities. It authorizes federal attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law.” That includes not only fraud in the naturalization process but a broader list of offenses: terrorism, gang affiliation, financial crimes, and serious felonies committed after naturalization, even if they were not disclosed at the time.
Historically, denaturalization has been rare, reserved mostly for cases involving fraud or war crimes. That began to change under Trump’s first term. This memo signals not only a continuation of that trend but a significant expansion.
Nearly 25 million naturalized citizens now face heightened scrutiny, not just for how they became citizens, but for what they have done since. The implications are not theoretical. At least one person has already lost their citizenship under the expanded guidelines—a naturalized citizen who had concealed a child pornography conviction from over a decade ago.
These cases unfold in civil court, not criminal. There is no jury, no right to a public defender, and no requirement of a new charge. Citizenship can be lost without a criminal trial.
This shift marks something deeper: the transformation of citizenship from a settled legal status to a conditional one, subject to the discretion of the state.
What was once the culmination of a long path toward inclusion is being recast as temporary. In effect, naturalized citizens are being placed in a second-tier category, one that quietly reinscribes the question of who truly counts as American.
Denaturalization isn’t new, but its political use has always followed a pattern. It starts with those labeled “undesirable” by those in power. It is justified in the name of national security or moral fitness. And it almost always begins at the margins.
We’ve seen this pattern before, not only in U.S. history but in darker chapters abroad. In 1935, Nazi Germany’s Reich Citizenship Law reclassified Jews as non-citizens and enabled mass denaturalizations under the pretext that they were foreign elements. That legal erasure paved the way for what followed.
This isn’t a comparison of regimes. It’s an alert to method. Stripping citizenship may appear administrative, but it functions as a political tool. It redefines who belongs. And when belonging is linked to behavior, belief, or dissent, exclusion becomes a form of punishment. The state doesn’t need to imprison its critics if it can convince them to remain silent.
This shift did not happen in isolation. It follows a clear and familiar sequence, rooted in a politics of narrowing inclusion.
First came the undocumented: the raids, the deportations, the wall.
Then student visa holders, many of them active in pro-Palestinian protests, began facing visa cancellations for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.
Then green card holders, long assumed to have permanent status, were warned that associating with “radical” movements could threaten their residency.
Now naturalized citizens—people who followed every rule, paid every fee, and passed every test—are being told that even citizenship may no longer be permanent.
Though framed as immigration enforcement, this is more accurately a strategy for suppressing dissent and limiting political participation.
The chilling effect is already visible. In a democracy under strain, repression does not require mass arrests—only enough uncertainty to make people hesitate. The question is no longer whether one may speak, but whether it is safe to.
Each targeted group serves two purposes: to isolate and intimidate, and to normalize the repression that follows.
In this regime of conditional belonging, the logic begins to resemble systems where political membership could be revoked not only for crimes but for disloyalty. Denaturalization becomes not merely a legal act but a political one—a quiet form of disenfranchisement and erasure.
From an anthropological perspective, this marks a shift from citizenship as a legal contract to citizenship as performance. The state no longer demands only compliance; it demands affirmation. What is threatened is not just individual status but the shared space of political presence itself.
Once a system is in place that allows the state to revoke citizenship from some, it sets the precedent to do so more broadly. This is how power grows: not in sudden ruptures, but in exceptions that gradually become the rule.
There is a moral hazard embedded in this logic. If rights can be revoked, they are no longer rights. Protest becomes dangerous. Silence becomes a form of self-protection.
If citizenship can be stripped for mistakes made after naturalization, or withheld because of dissent, then we are no longer talking about immigration law. We are talking about political control enforced through legal identity.
We are witnessing the construction of a system in which belonging is contingent on obedience, and protest becomes a privilege rather than a right.
Democratic citizenship cannot be defended selectively. If we fail to protect it for all, we accept the premise that it can be revoked at will. That logic—linking silence with safety—is one we must refuse.
If we still believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then we must insist on a citizenship that belongs to all of the people, not just the obedient ones.
Suggested Readings
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.
Coutin, Susan Bibler. Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Dean, Martin. “The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Confiscation Policy up to the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 217–242.
Greenberg, James B., and Josiah McC. Heyman. 2012. “Neoliberal Capital and the Mobility Approach in Anthropology.” In Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico: Structures, Struggles, and Futures, edited by Thomas Weaver, James B. Greenberg, Anne Browning, and William Alexander, 49–72. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
The Guardian. “Trump Seizes on ‘Moral Character’ Loophole as Way to Revoke Citizenship from Naturalized Americans.” The Guardian, July 1, 2025.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/01/us-citizenship-denaturalization-trump-memo
Heyman, Josiah McC. “Constructing ‘Illegality’: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses.” In Illegal Immigration in America: A Reference Handbook, edited by David W. Haines and Karen E. Rosenblum. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Section 5 doesn’t just target terrorists or war criminals. It reclassifies civil denaturalization as a top enforcement priority and lowers the threshold for stripping citizenship to a civil standard—preponderance of evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That turns a foundational right into something that can be revoked by administrative discretion rather than due process.
The language—“national security threats,” “terrorism,” “serious crimes”—is intentionally vague. And vague legal categories have a long history of being stretched to fit political needs. We’ve seen this before: denaturalization used against labor organizers, dissidents, immigrants whose beliefs were out of step with the government’s agenda. Once normalized, it doesn’t stay confined to the extreme cases.
If you trust the state to wield this power fairly, ask yourself which administration you’re willing to hand it to next. Because powers created in the name of security are almost always repurposed—and rarely surrendered. This isn’t about protecting citizenship. It’s about redefining it as conditional.
Adding to your list of citizenship targeted for reconsideration is the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment, which right to citizenship couldn't be stated any more plainly in the 1868 constitutional text. This constitutional right is now under direct attack by the current administration and is one which our Supreme Court also appears willing to reconsider.
This obsession with holding immigrants to the most rigorous application of citizenship law is brought to you by a president who is the grandson of a German immigrant (Friedrich Trumpf)
who dodged his German military obligation, lost his German citizenship and was deported to the USA. In 1892 he became a naturalized US Citizen. Of course, our current Trump would not be allowed continued citizenship himself, based on his extensive criminal record, under the rules he now enforces on other more recent immigrants.
Interestingly, apparently attempting to sweep aside the unwholesome record of his father's US entry, Donald's father, Fred, claimed his father (Friedrich) was an emigrant from Sweden. In his 1987 autobiography, Donald repeated this same claim. Friedrich was born and raised in Kallstadt, Germany. His son claimed his ancestry from Karlstad, Sweden. To Donald's obvious embarrassment, recently the German Chancellor, in a White House meeting, presented Donald a framed copy of Friedrich's German birth certificate.