Naturalized Citizens Are Scared

On a bookshelf near my desk, I still have the souvenir United States flag that I received during my naturalization ceremony, in 1994. I remember a tenderhearted judge got emotional as the room full of immigrants swore the Oath of Allegiance and that, afterward, my family took me to Burgerville to celebrate. The next morning, my teacher asked me to explain to my classmates—all natural-born Americans—how I felt about becoming a citizen at age 13.

One girl had a question: “So Chris can never be president?”  

I wasn’t worried about becoming president—I just wanted to get to the computer lab, where we were free to slaughter squirrels in The Oregon Trail. But her question revealed that even kids know there are two kinds of citizens: the ones who are born here, and the ones like me. The distinction is written into the Constitution, a one-line fissure that Donald Trump used to crack open the country: “Now we have to look at it,” Trump said, after compelling Barack Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. “Is it real? Is it proper?”

Nearly 25 million naturalized citizens live in the U.S., and we are accustomed to extra scrutiny. I expect supplemental questions on medical forms, close inspection at border crossings, and bureaucratic requests to see my naturalization certificate. But I had never doubted that my U.S. citizenship was permanent, and that I was guaranteed the same rights of speech, assembly, and due process as natural-born Americans. Now I’m not so sure.

Last month, the Department of Justice released a civil-enforcement memo listing the denaturalization of U.S. citizens as a top-five priority and pledging to “maximally pursue” all viable cases, including people who are “a potential danger to national security” and, more vague, anyone “sufficiently important to pursue.” President Trump has suggested that targets could include citizens whom he views as his political enemies, such as Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral candidate who was born in Uganda and naturalized in 2018: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said. “We’re going to look at everything.”

[Read: Why civics is about more than citizenship]

“Looking at everything” can be unnerving for naturalized citizens. Our document trails can span decades and continents. Thankfully, I was naturalized as a child, before I had much background to check, before the internet, before online surveillance. I was born in Brazil, in 1981, during the twilight of its military dictatorship, and transplanted to the United States as a baby through a byzantine international-adoption process. My birth mother had no way of knowing for sure what awaited me, but she understood that her child would have a better chance in the “land of the free.”

I don’t consider myself “a potential danger to national security” or “sufficiently important to pursue,” but I also don’t believe that American security is threatened by international students, campus protesters, or undocumented people selling hot dogs at Home Depot. I’m a professor who writes critically about American power; I believe in civil disobedience; and I support my students when they exercise their freedom of conscience.

Because I was naturalized as a child, I didn’t have to take the famous civics test—I was still learning that stuff in school. I just rolled my fingertips in wet ink and held still for a three-quarter-profile photograph that revealed my nose shape, ear placement, jawline, and forehead contour. My parents sat beside me for an interview with an immigration officer who asked me my name, where I lived, and who took care of me.

But these days, I wonder a lot about that civics test. It consists of 10 questions, selected from a list of 100, on the principles of democracy, our system of government, our rights and responsibilities, and milestones in American history. The test is oral; an official asks questions in deliberately slow, even tones, checking the responses against a list of sanctioned answers. Applicants need to get only six answers correct in order to pass. Democracy is messy, but this test is supposed to be easy.

However, so much has changed in the past few years that I’m not sure how a prospective citizen would answer those questions today. Are the correct answers to the test still true of the United States?

What does the Constitution do? The Constitution protects the basic rights of Americans.

One of the Constitution’s bedrock principles can be traced back to a revision that Thomas Jefferson made to an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, replacing “our fellow subjects” with “our fellow citizens.”

As with constitutional theories of executive power, theories of citizenship are subject to interpretation. Chief Justice Earl Warren distilled the concept as “the right to have rights.” His Court deemed the revocation of citizenship cruel and unusual, tantamount to banishment, “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”

By testing the constitutional rights of citizenship on two fronts—attempting to denaturalize Americans and to strip away birthright citizenship—Trump is claiming the power of a king to banish his subjects. In the United States, citizens choose the president. The president does not choose citizens

What is the “rule of law”? Nobody is above the law.

Except, perhaps, the president, who is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts performed while in office. Trump is distorting that principle by directing the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE to enforce his own vision of the law without regard for constitutional norms.

Civil law is more malleable than criminal law, with fewer assurances of due process and a lower burden of proof. ICE raids rely on kinetic force to fill detention cells. Denaturalization cases can rely on stealthy legal proceedings. In 2018, the Trump administration stripped a man of his citizenship. He was married to a U.S. citizen and had been naturalized for 12 years. The administration accused him of fraudulently using an alias to apply for his papers after having been ordered to leave the country. In an article for the American Bar Association, two legal scholars argued that this was more likely the result of a bureaucratic mix-up. Whatever the truth of the matter, the summons was served to an old address, and the man lost his citizenship without ever having had the chance to defend himself in a hearing.

[Read: The fragility of American citizenship]

The DOJ is signaling an aggressive pursuit of denaturalization that could lead to more cases like these. In the most extreme scenarios, Americans could be banished to a country where they have no connection or even passing familiarity with the language or culture.

What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful? Checks and balances.

Denaturalization efforts may fail in federal court, but the Trump administration has a habit of acting first and answering to judges later. When courts do intervene, a decision can take weeks or months, and the Supreme Court recently ruled that federal judges lack the authority to order nationwide injunctions while they review an individual case. FBI and ICE investigations, however, can be opened quickly and have been accelerated by new surveillance technologies.

How far might a Trump administration unbound by the courts go? Few people foresaw late-night deportation flights to El Salvador, the deployment of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, a U.S. senator thrown to the ground and handcuffed by FBI agents for speaking out during a Department of Homeland Security press conference. To many Americans who have roots in countries with an authoritarian government, these events don’t seem so alien.

What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment? Speech.

And all the rights that flow from it: Assembly. Religion. Press. Petitioning the government.

During the McCarthy era, the Department of Justice targeted alleged anarchists and Communists for denaturalization, scrutinizing the years well before and after they had arrived in the U.S. for evidence of any lack of “moral character,” which could include gambling, drunkenness, or affiliation with labor unions. From 1907 to 1967, more than 22,000 Americans were denaturalized.

Even if only a handful of people are stripped of their citizenship in the coming years, it would be enough to chill the speech of countless naturalized citizens, many of whom are already cautious about exercising their First Amendment rights. The mere prospect of a lengthy, costly, traumatic legal proceeding is enough to induce silence.

What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy? Help with a campaign. Publicly support or oppose an issue or policy.

If, apparently, it’s the “proper” campaign, issue, or policy.

What movement tried to end racial discrimination? The civil-rights movement.

The question of who has the right to have rights is as old as our republic. Since the Constitutional Convention, white Americans have fiercely debated the citizenship rights of Indigenous Americans, Black people, and women. The Fourteenth Amendment, which established birthright citizenship, and equal protection under the law for Black Americans, was the most transformative outcome of the Civil War. Until 1940, an American woman who married a foreign-born man could be stripped of her citizenship. Only through civil unrest and civil disobedience did the long arc of the moral universe bend toward justice.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act opened the door for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national-origin quotas that had limited immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. The act “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he signed the immigration bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The possibility of multiracial democracy emerged from the civil-rights movement and the laws that followed. Turning back the clock on race and citizenship, and stoking fears about the blood of America, is a return to injustice and cruelty.

What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen? To support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Now Americans like me have to wonder if we can hold true to that promise, or whether speaking up for the Constitution could jeopardize our citizenship.