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James B. Greenberg's avatar

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.

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RG Rich's avatar

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.

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