The Trump Administration Is Going After Naturalized Citizens Now

By Clio Chang, Splinter

12 June 18

onald Trump’s administration is not only busy tearing children away from their parents at the border—they’re also going to start focusing on fresh new ways to oppress naturalized citizens in America. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency that oversees immigration applications, is now creating a new office staffed by several dozen employees. It will be dedicated to looking for people who may have cheated to obtain their citizenship and stripping them of it. Think of it as terrorization by paperwork.

USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna told the AP in an interview that while the agency has taken up such cases before, this will be the first large-scale coordinated effort. “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.” The cases will then be referred to the Department of Justice, which could seek to remove a person’s citizenship or even bring criminal fraud charges.

The act of the government denaturalizing citizens is rare and, according to the AP, previous efforts have mainly focused on suspected war criminals, such as former Nazis, who lied on their documentation. Now it will be just one more tool in the White House’s arsenal to terrorize the country’s immigrants.