Today, Explained - Revoking US citizenship

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

President Trump wants to ramp up denaturalization — revoking citizenship from Americans who were born elsewhere. It’s a practice with a long and controversial history. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Immigrants take the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony. Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump re-entered office about six months ago, and since then we've covered a lot of immigration stories on Today Explained. We've done deportations to a concentration camp in El Salvador. As many as possible. We've done deportations to Gitmo. Most people don't even know about it. We've done people being turned away at points of entry into airports. We don't want them.

But today we're going gonna do a different one, one that doesn't get as much attention. Today, we're gonna talk about denaturalization, revoking U.S. citizenship from people who weren't born here but are, on paper, Americans, with a paper to prove it. They're old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too.

You want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job that we'll work on together. Nicole Norell is a senior politics reporter at Vox, and she wrote about a recent Department of Justice memo on denaturalization. So yeah, the D.R.J. put out this memo essentially saying that it would try to strip citizenship from people who had, quote unquote, illegally procured American citizenship, either because they made misrepresentations on their citizenship application, because they were ineligible for citizenship at the time they applied, or because they committed crimes that warranted stripping them of citizenship.

But it goes further encouraging action, even against those who haven't been convicted, just charged with a crime. And the DOJ is also giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue denaturalization. That it would permit the division to denaturalize for just about anything. And they do actually have the power to do this, but it's historically been very rarely exercised. And the DOJ is making sort of a conservative effort here to expand its use.

But it is like, you know, part of this broader immigration strategy, as you alluded to, that we've been seeing coming out of the second Trump administration, which has really been about spreading fear among people living here who were not born in the US, whether or not they're US citizens. And denaturalization is sort of just one of many tactics here. And Donald Trump has made some high profile threats to denaturalize various Americans. I think New York mayoral candidate, Mom Donnie comes to mind. And also electric car magnate Elon Musk?

Yes, both have been some targets that Trump has identified. So Elon Musk, as you mentioned, is South African, became a US citizen in 2002. After his very public falling out with Trump, Trump sort of made suggestions that he could be denationalized. He's upset that he's losing his EV mandate. And except, you know, he's very upset about things, but, you know, he could lose a lot more than that. I can tell you right now. And same with Mbaddani.

He's from Uganda, became a citizen in 2018. Donald Trump said that I should be arrested. He said that I should be deported. He said that I should be denaturalized. And he said those things about me, someone who stands to be the first immigrant mayor of this city in generations, someone who would also be the first Muslim and the first South Asian mayor in this city's history. In his case, the denaturalization push seems less about sort of retribution and more directly

linked to his criticism of the war in Gaza and also his opposition to ICE raids. You know, we saw Rudy Giuliani, who's now at DHS, question whether Mamdani is a loyal American as a result of that. Do you see him as an enemy of America? Do I see him as an enemy of America? What are you saying? My personal personal yes, you're damn right. I do So they are some of those those targets But are those more just like empty threats whereas in the background? This is something his administration is actually

pursuing and in much lower profile cases, so I think, you know, these ones are clearly politically motivated and irresponsible in that sense because it is sort of broadening the universe of people who feel like they might be targeted for denaturalization. But, you know, when it actually comes to the numbers and to the cases that we've seen the DOJ publicize, we saw recently that they shared that they had successfully denaturalized someone who shared child pornography prior to obtaining citizenship and who also didn't disclose that crime on his citizenship application.

That's not necessarily an unusual application of the federal government's denaturalization power, but it's not clear if Trump is going beyond the typical use cases just yet. And this memo does suggest that they would, but it's hard to say whether that's sort of materially coming to fruition. Okay. So you said this is something the Trump administration, the DOJ can do, and it's been done in the past, though not a lot.

How does it work? There is a process associated here that has to play out before a judge. But there are some due process concerns associated with it. So especially given that the Trump administration is pursuing civil proceedings here, that's important because defendants won't get an attorney and the burden of proof from the government's part is a lot lower than it would be in criminal court. But as I said, it's been sort of very rarely exercised and that's because the legal grounds for denaturalization

are really narrow under current law. On the one hand, you can be denaturalized if you commit human rights violations like war crimes and acts of terrorism. Don't think many people would sort of disagree with those use cases. You can also be stripped of citizenship if you weren't eligible for citizenship at the time you applied, and there can be a number of reasons. You can be found ineligible, for example, you lied on your citizenship application,

you didn't complete the mandatory five-year permanent residency beforehand. You can also be considered ineligible if you did not exhibit good moral character, or you were not, quote, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States. Those last two provisions in particular are kind of worrying because they can be interpreted pretty broadly. It's like, what does good moral character really mean? And I think that's where the Trump administration has some potential wiggle room to expand the use cases for denaturalization. You know, in the DOJ memo, we did see them say that they wanted to prioritize people who pose a potential danger to national security. And that's concerning given the way that this administration has already tried to invoke national security grounds to deport people who are voicing political opinions it doesn't like.

Is it already happening or is it something that's going to happen? So it, you know, this memo came out in June. It's still very early and hard to tell. But we do know from the first Trump administration, it was a priority of White House adviser Stephen Miller. Murderous migrant mobs. So the DOJ launched this new section focused on denaturalization and investigated about 700,000 naturalized citizens. That resulted in 160 active denaturalization cases, which was more than under any modern president.

But it's not clear ultimately how many people were denaturalized. Should we also anticipate legal challenges here, as we've seen in any number of this administration's immigration initiatives? Yeah, of course. I mean, I think, you know, it depends how sloppy they are, right? If indeed Trump is pursuing cases against his political enemies simply because they're rubbing him the wrong way, then yeah, I think there's a big question as to whether that's going to actually hold up in court.

It's also, so if he's going to go after people for just like paperwork errors that clearly aren't malicious representations, that would also be pretty legally egregious. Or at least that's what the Supreme Court said in this 2017 case that a lot of people are citing as sort of precedent here. But I think also whenever we're talking about this question of whether is that legal when it comes to this administration, we also have to remember that there is a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that is helping Trump enact his agenda and has proved pretty willing to step on some precedents in order to do so.

What happens to someone after they've been denaturalized, asking for a naturalized citizen, I know? Yeah, so I think in most cases, we're dealing with people who have committed crimes that would then make them deportable. But if someone was found to be ineligible for citizenship for some other reason, then they might just revert back to the green card and stay on that status.

Or if it was then found that they didn't meet the original criteria for a green card, they could also potentially be deportable. But it can also get tricky when US citizenship is the only citizenship they have. So let's say they were born somewhere else and relinquished their other citizenship and then became an American citizen.

I mean, there's something like 25 million naturalized citizens in this country. They are our friends, they're our family, they're a lot of people. Should they be scared right now that this president sees this as a tool more so than any president in modern history? Yeah, you know, I've been kind of grappling with this question throughout Trump's second term and I'm always hesitant to catastrophize too much because there's so much we don't know about how the administration is gonna implement this memo and the legal authority that the administration has here is quite narrow. But at the same time, you know, the administration is pushing the bounds of what many people who have been working on immigrant rights for many years thought possible. And the goal of all of that is fear. I hate to

give into that because I am, many of my family members are immigrants and I'm deeply invested in it, but I am fearful for what happens in our country now. And I think many naturalized citizens are too. Nicole Nerea Vox, but not for long, she's off to law school next semester and we wish her all the best in that first year, which apparently is a doozy.

When we're back on Today Explained, the long, ugly history of denaturalization in the United States, also a doozy. Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about media and tech and what happens when they collide. And this may be hard to remember, but not very long ago, magazines were a really big deal. And the most important magazines were owned by Conde Nast, the glitzy publishing empire that's the focus of a new book by New York Times reporter Michael Grinbaum. The way Conde Nast elevated its editors, the way they paid for their mortgages so they

could live in beautiful homes. There was a logic to it, which was that Kandey Nast itself became seen as this kind of enchanted land. You can hear the rest of our chat on channels wherever you listen to your favorite media podcast. So, Amanda Frost and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. I'm the author of You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. And the title of your book to me implies that denaturalization isn't exactly a novel concept.

No, it's not. And the idea of taking away citizenship generally, even of the native born is not a novel concept and and started with Dred Scott. Oh, yay. Oh, yay. Oh, yay. Dred Scott was a decision issued by the US Supreme Court in 1857. That was obviously just a few years before the start of the Civil War. The nation was riven by the question of slavery and also by the question of the status of non-white people in the United States. And Chief Justice Taney for the US Supreme Court was clear in his answer. He said, no person of color could ever be a citizen of the United States, whether that person was free or enslaved. And of course, our nation rejected that in the civil war and the reconstruction amendments that followed. But denaturalization was not the focus of that decision. That came later.

So one of the first major efforts at denaturalization came in 1907 with the expatriation act where Congress enacted legislation that said that among other things that all women, U.S. citizen women, whether born in the United States or naturalized, all those citizen women who married a non-citizen automatically lost their citizenship upon marriage. And the idea is you could only have one citizenship and that citizenship was the citizenship of the husband. And in fact, the U.S. citizen men who married non-citizen women, those women automatically became citizens.

So it was this idea that you could not have an independent legal identity or existence as a woman aside from that of your husband. And there was also a sense of, and if you choose to marry a non-citizen, then maybe we don't want you. And that came up in some legislative debates where the argument was basically, well, why don't you marry one of our good old American boys?

And if you don't, then you lose your right to claim or to state that you're an American, to have that identity. Was it controversial at the time? Did it rile people up? It certainly was controversial with some groups of people. It became a focus of activism by women who were fighting for the right to vote. So just to remind listeners, US citizen women got the right to vote in the constitution in 1920, but there was a long lead up to that. And so there were women fighting for the right to vote in California.

And one of these women, Ethel Mackenzie, who was born in the United States and then married a Scottish man, she fought successfully for the right of women to vote in the state of California. And then she herself couldn't vote because the government said, well, you married a non-citizen, you've lost your citizenship. She took a case up to the US Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously against her. Then she and her compatriots fought this in Congress and tried to get Congress to change the legislation so that US citizen women who married non-citizens wouldn't lose their citizenship. They were laughed at in these hearings and I think the date was around 1917-18. But here's the great moral of the story.

After US citizen women got the right to vote in 1920, suddenly Congress changed its tune. Yeah. So that power to vote enabled women to successfully get that legislation rewritten and amended so that US citizen women who married non-citizens didn't automatically lose their citizenship and the right to vote. So there were surely some women who were born in this country, were American citizens for a bunch of their lives, married some guy from some other country, lost their citizenship, and then gained it back in the early 1920s.

Oh, yes, absolutely, including a woman who served in Congress. In Ivy covered St. James Church, America's first woman diplomat, Mrs. Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, is married to Captain Berla Roda of the Danish Royal Lifeguard. You know, being America, this also got caught up in race. So Congress amended the law to say, okay, if you're a US citizen woman and you marry a non-citizen who's a white person, you keep your citizenship. But if you marry a non-citizen who is not, quote, eligible to naturalize, then you continue to lose your citizenship. That's because Asians, Arabs and other racial groups are not permitted to naturalize.

That eventually changed and it changed with the help of a woman who was elected to Congress who herself had lost her citizenship and regained it and she fought to end the last vestiges of that, both racist and sexist law for all US citizen women. Okay, so that's one chapter of denaturalization. What's the second, third, fourth? How many chapters are there before we get to the one that we're in right now? Yeah. So, Congress eventually started to embrace in the 20th century various different bases

for denaturalizing people who had gained their citizenship through naturalization. And Congress began to say, well, if you're a naturalized citizen, but it appears that you don't have allegiance to the United States or engage in activities that seem antithetical to American values, then we're going to claim that we never should have naturalized you, that you lied when you pledged your oath of allegiance to the United States and the Constitution, and we will take away your citizenship. So that happened throughout the 20th century. A scholar named Patrick Vale, who's researched research this deeply said about 22,000 people lost their citizenship

and many based on their political speech or their membership in the Communist Party or affiliation with communism. And we're talking about Red Scare. We're talking about McCarthyism. We're talking about the Cold War. Was it controversial to strip citizenship from communists at the time? So, yes, it was debated, right? And so, of course, some people embraced it, some people viewed communism as a true threat to the United States. One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

The citizens who support communism from our country, they're going to infiltrate our country and support communist ideals and lead to a communist revolution. Even if there are only one communist in the State Department, there could still be one communist who matters. And I should add, it wasn't just every member of the communist party or anyone who had shown some interest or affiliation with communism who was denaturalized. It was the subset of naturalized citizens who'd done that and then were causing trouble. So we're labor leaders.

Following arraignment, women defendants, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, awaiting deportation proceedings. We're fighting for various rights for workers in particular. Those individuals were the ones the government targeted for removal. As the crackdown on suspected subversives gathers momentum. And we eventually get over McCarthy and have a little bit less of a red scare. Does that also coincide with sort of the tapering off of all this denaturalization stuff? I think it was a combination, as it always is, of society shifting and realizing, the

general public realizing that communism may not have been the threat they viewed it originally, the United States growing in power post-World War II. And then we also have the Supreme Court showing some concerns about the use and overuse of denaturalization. And finally, that led up to a Supreme Court decision in 1967 called Afriam versus Rusk, in which the Supreme Court attempted to put an end to denaturalization. What was the story in that case? Who's Afriam? He was someone who was living in Israel and the question was whether his participation

in Israeli politics meant that he should be someone who should lose their citizenship under the statutes that existed at the time. And he fought this in court as did many before him who had attempted to be denaturalized, some successfully, some not. And that case which reached the Supreme Court in 1967, the court said, you know, looking back at this history, we are realizing that we cannot give the government the power to take away citizenship based on the fact that it doesn't like the speech or activities of its members. But then in a footnote, the court said, but of course you can lose your citizenship if

you gain citizenship if you naturalize through fraud or through error, which is what the statute provides. So that remained a basis for denaturalizing people. And a few people every year were denaturalized, mostly very serious war criminals, such as Nazi concentration camp guards and leaders who had lied about their past when they gained US citizenship. And it was 10, 11 people on average per year, right up until the first Trump administration, when denaturalization was ramped up. And the goal was, let's use this as an immigration enforcement tool and denaturalize far more people. After going through the history we just went through, after writing the book that you wrote

and seeing that this tool, you know, sort of waxes and wanes in popularity over the decades and even centuries, does that, I don't know, bring you some level of comfort or something? That oh, history is just repeating itself. It's just echoing and we'll live to see another day. Definitely no level of comfort with the situation. It more reminds me that the battles that you fought in the past are never fully in the past and have to be re-fought every generation or so. I mean, I should remind listeners that, of course, we also had Japanese immigrants and native-born Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II because of fear, because

of a sense that they could not possibly be loyal. That was what the government said. And in fact, there was a coercive effort to force or at least pressure these people who are kept in these internment camps in the United States to abandon their citizenship, to give up their citizenship, which some did under that coercive pressure of being imprisoned and being afraid. And so they regained it, but only through legal battles that followed from World War II. And of course the government eventually apologized and gave reparations to those people.

This brief picture is actually the prologue to a story that is yet to be told. And so I guess that's just a reminder, we do seem to periodically do this out of fear, out of distrust, out of a sense that some people are not truly American. It will be fully told only when circumstances permit the loyal American citizens once again to enjoy the freedom we in this country cherish and when the disloyal we hope have left this country for good. And we have to keep at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Her book, once again, is You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Check it out. Denise Guerra made the show, Jolie Meyers edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Andrea Christens' daughter, and Patrick Boyd mixed. I am Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. you