Amanda Frost: The Fragility of American Citizenship

Amanda Frost in The Atlantic looks at the Trump administration's efforts at citizenship stripping. Frost describes "[t]he piece [as] a snapshot of my forthcoming book on the topic entitled 'Unmaking Americans: A History of Citizenship Stripping in the United States.'”

Frost writes that

"the Trump administration has explicitly targeted the citizenship of Americans born near the southern border and naturalized citizens, jeopardizing the citizenship of millions of people on the grounds that there was fraud or error in the naturalization process—the one avenue left to revoke citizenship after Afroyim v. Rusk. But there is no reason to think the government will stop there. Last year, President Trump announced he has the power to issue an executive order denying citizenship to tens of millions of native-born children of undocumented immigrants, despite the clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment stating otherwise. Already, the assumption that some people are not `real' Americans has permeated the culture of immigration agencies, leading the government to mistakenly arrest, detain, and deport U.S. citizens who code as `un-American' to the immigration officials charged with making these decisions.

Nor is it paranoid to predict that in a world in which citizenship is up for grabs, the government will attack its critics as less than `real' Americans. President Trump did just that in a tweet instructing four congresswomen of color to `go back … [to the] places from which they came,' even though they are all U.S. citizens and three of the four were born in the United States."

KJ