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| Edmond Dantes/PEXELS |
There needs to be a massive denaturalization effort to rectify the mistaken awards of citizenship over the past 60 years.
One of the policy goals conservatives most want the Trump administration to accomplish is mass deportations. Not just for illegals or those who have committed crimes, but also for those who have been granted citizenship and have proven themselves civilizationally unequipped to retain the privilege.Earlier this week, the Department of Justice announced denaturalization actions against 17 persons “accused of serious offenses.” Almost all of the cases involve either some kind of fraud or the sexual abuse of a minor. In May, the department announced similar actions against 12 people accused of “terrorist support, war crimes, espionage, sexual abuse, and more.”
While it is important to remove every single person that matches those criteria in the country, periodical numbers like 17 and 12 do not seem to match expectations of the many more who might be — or should be — eligible for denaturalization and, ultimately, deportation.
Between 1907 and 1967, 22,000 citizens were denaturalized (an average of about 367 per year), which is reportedly more than any other democracy in the world at the time. There were other rules governing citizenship as well, such as women marrying foreign men automatically losing citizenship or anyone voting in a foreign election being stripped of the privilege as well. One could be denaturalized for supporting government regimes antithetical to the American constitutional order.
But none of that is the case anymore. From 1990 to 2018, only 130 denaturalization proceedings had been filed (or, seven per year on average). The downturn on denaturalization came at a time when there are exponentially more persons granted citizenship who have proven themselves unworthy of it.
Throughout American history, “the use of denaturalizing people has ebbed and flowed — it’s not quick, it’s not easy to do,” Lora Ries, Director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, told The Federalist. Ries explained that judges will often decide not to denaturalize citizens, even when they deserve it.
Denaturalization decisions are determined by federal courts, not immigration courts. However, similar to the way that immigration judges are “loath to deport aliens with green cards, even though lawful permanent residents are indeed deportable,” Ries said, “imagine the resistance to strip citizenship away.”
Denaturalizing was not always as difficult as it is now. Clear-cut cases of fraud or sexual abuse like the ones highlighted by the Department of Justice are the most likely to succeed in denaturalization, but that is mostly because a Supreme Court case from 1967 effectively removed the sovereign right of the United States government to strip citizenship, except in certain cases like fraud and abuse.
In Afroyim v. Rusk, a 5-4 majority of the Warren Court decided that the U.S. does not have the authority to revoke anyone’s citizenship involuntarily. The case derived from a man of Polish birth, naturalized in 1926, who voted in the Israeli election in 1951, directly violating the Nationality Act of 1940.
The court held:
Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof.
(a) Congress has no express power under the Constitution to strip a person of citizenship, and no such power can be sustained as an implied attribute of sovereignty, as was recognized by Congress before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. …
(b) The Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States …” completely controls the status of citizenship, and prevents the cancellation of petitioner’s citizenship.
The result gave naturalized citizens sovereignty over their citizenship as opposed to the government.
In its ruling, the high court essentially decided it had the power to overrule Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “The Congress shall have Power … To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Rules about “naturalization” clearly also means setting rules about denaturalization, Ries said.
There have been subsequent cases that chip away slightly at the dramatic ruling in Afroyim. For example, Fedorenko v. United States in 1981 allowed denaturalization to occur if the original naturalization was obtained fraudulently — such as through falsifying documents or bogus claims of refugee or asylum. The overall effect of Afroyim, however, has been to make denaturalization extremely difficult to achieve, and under specific, arduous circumstances.
President Bill Clinton’s “Citizenship USA” initiative, which was a 1996 scheme to fast-track as many naturalizations as possible in order to swamp the ballot box with foreigners in favor of Clinton’s reelection, resulted in at least 6,000 foreigners being naturalized despite having criminal histories or other disqualifying factors.
When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) attempted to pursue administrative denaturalizations, they were stopped by a federal judge, and by 2001, the Department of Justice decided not to challenge for denaturalization in court because of how difficult achieving the seemingly simple task had become.--->READ MORE HERE
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