The Trump Administration’s animus has not been limited to the Somali community. On the campaign trail, in 2024, then Senator J. D. Vance claimed that Haitian migrants in Ohio ate pets; this year, the Administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for about three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians. In September, D.H.S. posted (and then deleted) an A.I.-generated image of a “Transformers” character facing off against an Indian Sikh man, with the phrases “America for Americans” and “Self-deport or find out.” But many Indians, like many Somalis, are U.S. citizens, as the Administration discovered during its crackdown in Minnesota.
Even for an agency that has been accused by multiple federal judges of flagrantly violating the law, actually deporting American citizens isn’t so easy. But there is a way to do so: by revoking their citizenship.
This isn’t entirely fantastical. There is considerable precedent for such a policy. In the first half of the twentieth century, as citizenship became a defining feature of nation-states, the U.S. stripped nearly twenty-two thousand people of that privilege. According to the scholar Patrick Weil, this was the most of any democratic country in that era. Political dissent spurred these efforts, as in the case of the activist and anarchist Emma Goldman. So, too, did straightforward racism—a series of exclusionary immigration laws ushered in an official, nativist reading of citizenship. In 1923, several years after a ban on most Asian immigration, the Supreme Court ruled that an Indian man seeking citizenship was racially ineligible for naturalization, in part because of the ban: how could Indians be American citizens if they weren’t even allowed to enter the country anymore? The government went on to denaturalize dozens of Indians living in the U.S.
The Civil Rights era led to the abolition of nationality-based immigration quotas. In 1967, the Court ruled that the Constitution protects “every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship, whatever his creed, color, or race.” When denaturalizations did occur, they often involved egregious offenses, such as Nazism, war crimes, or espionage. Denaturalization was a dramatic punishment, and the legal and political consensus was that it must be predicated on a dramatic crime.
The War on Terror moved away from that precedent. In 2010, the government launched a program to find people who may have misrepresented their identities to obtain permanent residency or citizenship. The program, named Operation Janus, initially uncovered three hundred and fifteen thousand instances of missing fingerprint data in immigration files, which were flagged for further investigation. Among those, only a quarter of one per cent revealed potential fraud: people who had been ordered deported and seemed to have used different identities to gain U.S. citizenship.
It was hardly a widespread problem—but it provided an opening for Trump. In 2018, his Administration expanded these efforts, announcing a task force to actively search for people who may have lied on citizenship applications; the following year, he launched his own program, calling it Operation Second Look. The move was relatively quiet, but critics voiced concerns that the effort seemed less like an attempt to protect national security than an attack on naturalization itself. A former D.O.J. attorney warned, in the Times, that “if we’re going after people who did nothing of note, or whose wrong caused no harm, it means they’re going after citizenship.” Fear pervaded immigrant communities, where naturalization was believed to offer irrevocable protection. As reported in The Nation, many immigrants reconsidered getting naturalized at all, afraid of “being targeted or tripped in a lie.” By the end of Trump’s first term, the Justice Department had filed an average of twenty-five denaturalization cases a year.
In the summer of 2025, soon after Trump settled back into Washington, senior officials at the D.O.J. directed their attorneys to make denaturalization a priority. The White House outlined target goals: no fewer than a hundred new cases per month. After a slow start, efforts are ramping up. This past May, there were fifteen cases filed. In early October, the D.O.J. announced that it was moving to strip forty people of citizenship, what it boasted was the “largest denaturalization effort in modern history.” The Attorney General, Todd Blanche, claimed that the objective was to “maintain our national security and protect the American people.”
