Two new developments reveal an extraordinary expansion of executive authority over the legal status of foreign-born Americans, both those already naturalized and those applying for permanent residency or citizenship.
The New York Times reported Friday that internal training materials distributed last month to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers instruct them to treat “endorsing, promoting or supporting anti-American views” or “antisemitic terrorism, ideologies or groups” as “overwhelmingly negative” factors in green card applications. Examples of disqualifying speech cited in the materials include pro-Palestinian campus protests, social media posts reading “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” with the Israeli flag crossed out, posts replacing “Israel” on a map with “Palestine” (none of which are anti-American). Green card approvals have fallen by more than half in recent months. USCIS job postings now refer to officers as “homeland defenders,” with one posting calling on candidates to “Protect your homeland and defend your culture.”
The Justice Department, meanwhile has sharply expanded its efforts at denaturalization. The DOJ has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it intends to revoke in a “first wave,” with cases distributed across 39 U.S. attorney’s offices, and has ordered DHS to refer up to 200 such cases per month. The historical baseline was 11 cases per year between 1990 and 2017; Trump’s entire first term filed 102 over four years. DOJ communications director Matthew Tragesser said the department is “moving at warp speed.”
The DOJ memo specifies 10 priority categories ranging from war crimes to Medicaid fraud, with a standardless catch-all authorizing prosecution of “any other cases sufficiently important to pursue.” Civil denaturalization, unlike criminal proceedings, provides no court-appointed counsel, no jury trial, and no requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt. There is no statute of limitations. The Supreme Court warned in Maslenjak v. United States (2017) that without strict limits, civil denaturalization gives prosecutors “nearly limitless leverage” over naturalized citizens—a universe of more than 20 million Americans. One analysis posits that the closest historical parallel is Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 State Department hearings on “Un-American” activity.
The “homeland defenders” being deployed are working from a definition of “anti-American” speech that the First Amendment would not tolerate as applied to citizens by birth. This would create a two-tier conception of citizenship in the “homeland.”