An Unnatural American
Some thoughts about citizenship and protection on this very merry Fourth of July. (WYSK. 7/4/25)
On this Fourth of July, I am alone and packing up the last of our stuff to make our move downstate to NYC. I’m procrastinating, surrounded by books and boxes, reading news about moves the Trump Administration — under the firm guidance of Natural Santa Monica Jewish-American Nativist Stephen Miller — has been making on the immigration front, including the just-passed bill that tripled ICE’s “enforcement” budget and made ICE into one of the most bankrolled police state organs in America…richer than even the FBI.
Normal scene at a Home Depot near you.
Given that way that ICE has functioned like Trump’s personal goon squad, carrying out psychological warfare and counterinsurgency ops in strategic locations (like Los Angeles) to instill fear in immigrants and boost Trump’s political capital with the MAGA base, it’s pretty obvious all this money, power, and prestige will further turn ICE into a welfare program for PTSD’d veterans but also entrench it as Trump’s personal enforcer/terror squad. Hoover had the FBI. Trump has ICE.
As an immigrant and a naturalized American citizen, I watch this with interest and not a small amount of concern. I’m legal. I was “naturalized” as a teen when my parents became citizens. But this naturalized status might not be as stable as we naturalized citizens would like to believe. See, one thing the Trump Admin has been doing is putting a lot more focus on denaturalizing citizens — on making naturalized Americans unnatural again. There was a memo put out by Trump’s DOJ last month that told the department to prioritize denaturalization — to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” is how the memo put it.
And among the things that could trigger this denaturalization process are accusations of fraud during the citizenship process — but it’s also open-ended, basically giving the Justice Department the power of deciding whether someone should be stripped of citizenship.
Is it just idle talk? Maybe. But the denaturalization push has become more serious — with Trump allies pushing to denaturalize their political enemies as part of their ongoing culture war. Now there’s talk in the MAGA world of stripping Zohran Mamdani of his citizenship. If Trump’s people do go for it, I don’t see what the downside for them would be. The MAGA base would love it. To them Trump would be making good on his promise to purifying America of all the criminals and scum and evil foreigners destroying this country from within…
If you read the DOJ memo, you’ll find that the bar to starting the denaturalization process is fairly low. All you need is to have done some financial fraud unrelated to your citizenship process or misrepresented something on your citizenship application. So it’s not hard to imagine the DOJ following a dual approach: first, it goes on a fishing investigation to find if you failed to disclose some income on your taxes or had lied on a rental application or made some mistakes on your citizenship forms. Then, it uses this to start the process of stripping an immigrant of their citizenship.
Would it succeed? I’ve read some legal analysis that says denaturalization is difficult because court precedent has set the burden of proof the government needs to surmount at a very high level. But precedent doesn’t mean much. A previous precedent can be easily broken by the Supreme Court, and a new precedent can be established…
What I’m trying to get at is that I’m realizing more and more how precarious citizenship for people like me might be. There are ICE raids happening even in our little town in the Hudson Valley, just blocks away from me. It may seem like it has nothing to do with us. We’re legal…we’re citizens. And yet even we privileged immigrants — even with our protected naturalized citizen status — are all just one bullshit accusation and a court judgement away from being made unnatural Americans…made stateless and deported. It might not happen…or it might…and this uncertainty is a tactic of repression and psycho-terror in and of itself.
Happy Fourth of July!
Yasha
🫡🫡🫡🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
PS: Greg Grandin has a great essay on the history of birthright citizenship. Check it out. (We recorded an ep with Greg and we’ll be releasing it next week.)
PPS: The DOJ memo:
Damn: that article hits dark. My family members in the States are Vietnamese-Americans, but professional class - doctors, mostly. Not surprisingly: they all loathe Trump. I thought their status would be pretty safe in future, but after reading the article, I now have my doubts.
It's probably not what you want to hear, Yasha - but if things go really dark, you, Evgenia and kids are welcome in Australia. The society is still pretty racist - blackface was acceptable on TV until pretty recently - but it's *amateur* racism. That sort of *professional* racism showed by Stephen Miller would be so offputting that he'd be more likely to have the shit beaten out of him on the streets than promoted.
(Needless to say, the standing offer of welcome is also for my family. We have better public transport and better public space. And the playgrounds are to die for.)
Elon Musk, Zohran Mamdani and Yasha Levine: the New York Three (with more to be added).
Hopefully you beat the system like the Chicago 7.