Donald Trump has seized on the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., in ways that are consistent with the president’s anti-immigrant vision. Almost immediately in the wake of Wednesday’s deadly violence, for example, the Republican said he would “permanently” pause all migration from “third world countries,” though he didn’t elaborate on which nations deserved the label.
That, however, was just part of a broader policy shift that included pausing asylum decisions for people from Afghanistan — including those who helped the U.S. during the war in their country — and imposing new restrictions on prospective immigrants from countries deemed “high risk.”
But as important as these developments were (and are), it’s also worth dwelling on something else the president included as part of his longer tirade. Reuters reported:
Trump said he would end all federal benefits and subsidies for ‘non-citizens,’ adding he would ‘denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility’ and deport any foreign national deemed a public charge, security risk, or ‘non-compatible with Western civilization.’
If it isn’t obvious, many Americans weren’t born in the United States and became citizens through the naturalization process. What Trump endorsed online is a policy in which his administration would assert the authority to “denaturalize” those people, stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship.
The ambitions are not altogether new. In June, Trump’s Justice Department took some steps in this direction. But in the wake of last week’s National Guard shooting, the White House appears eager to push this to a new level.
Asked on Sunday night about his intention to revoke the citizenship of naturalized Americans, the president replied, “Well, we’ll see. I mean, yeah, we have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized, maybe through Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing. If I have the power to do it — I’m not sure that I do — but if I do, I would denaturalize, absolutely.” The New York Times reported, “He did not provide details about how he would go about it, or provide specific evidence about problems created by immigrants. Under federal law, U.S. citizens can generally only be denaturalized if they are found to have concealed material facts about their background in gaining citizenship or to have misrepresented themselves in the process.” Whether Trump and his team intend to go further than the law allows remains to be seen — although if the White House starts taking citizenship away from Americans, the possibilities for rampant abuse appear inevitable. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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