Ominous “Solutions” to Nonexistent Problems
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The New (Old) Rules of American Ethnonationalism
At some point, I think it behooves people who understand the history of fascism, ethnonationalist movements, and the systemic legal de-personing of targeted minority groups, to accept that if the Trump regime walks like a duck and talks like a duck for long enough, it’s probably time to admit we’re talking about Nazi (with a capital N) ducks now. Right now the administration is working with a theocratic ultra-reactionary Supreme Court to redefine citizenship rights, conducting Gestapo raids on the streets of our cities to kidnap random brown people nationwide, and selling merchandise for an alligator-themed concentration camp to overjoyed fascist fanboys. It doesn’t take a genius to realize we are on the precipice of something larger now, something more malevolent, horrifying, and shameful. When an openly ethnonationalist government built around a cult of personality and powered by the myth of national rebirth starts taking all the same steps the literal goddamned Third Reich took to consolidate fascist rule and orchestrate a genocide, the idea that the Trumpenreich’s intentions remain unknowable is a fantasy indulged only by complicit cowards and collaborators.
Given that, I think Americans should be far more alarmed than they are about news that the Trumpenreich Department of Justice under Pam Bondi intends to massively expand its efforts to denaturalize foreign-born American citizens, while broadening the categories of people who can have their citizenship stripped in such vague and poorly-defined ways that it could easily allow Trump to denaturalize his political enemies. After all, this is an administration that has already tried to unilaterally revoke legal status for foreign students politically opposed to Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza, not to mention the long and horrifying Pig Empire history of denaturalization, the creation of stateless people, and the inevitable outcome of stripping the civil rights of targeted marginalized groups under fascism. For more details, let’s look at this July 1st roundup by Stephen Prager, writing for Common Dreams.
‘All Are Now Vulnerable’: Legal Scholars Alarmed as DOJ Begins Push to Denaturalize Citizens
“On June 11, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an internal memo written by Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate calling on DOJ attorneys to pursue “civil denaturalization” of foreign-born U.S. citizens.
“The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” the memo said, adding that it should be among the division’s top five priorities.
It suggested a wide variety of citizens who could be targeted for denaturalization. This includes perpetrators of violent offenses like “torture, war crimes, or other human rights violations.” But it also targets much broader groups of people such as those “who pose a potential danger to national security” or those who “acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations.”
It also calls for “any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
Despite the euphemistic nature of the term “denaturalization,” I think it’s important to be frank and upfront about what we’re talking about here. Denaturalization is the process of stripping the citizenship, and therefore the citizenship rights, of people who by necessity are in fact American citizens. As such, this policy change would allow the Trump administration to target roughly twenty-five million naturalized citizens, or legal immigrants who have completed the process of becoming U.S. citizens. What does a foreign-born American who is stripped of their citizenship become? An undocumented migrant; now subject to kidnapping, confinement in concentration camps, and thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions, being illegally trafficked to foreign gulags in unsafe third party countries that may or may not have open slave markets.
Please keep in mind that we’re not talking about a hypothetical scenario here. As demonstrated by the US State Department’s attempts to instantly revoke student visas and green cards based on vague “national security” concerns to then allow for the kidnapping and attempted deportation of anti-genocide protestors like Mahmoud Khalil, these nazis are happy to go after anyone they personally feel doesn’t count as a real American, or shouldn’t be in the country. In other words, to pretend the application of this policy won’t be racist, punitive, and politically motivated would be an unconscionably naïve position at this point, particularly because the vague wording indicating who can be targeted and why, as well as the fact that these denaturalization hearings will be conducted in civil courts where defendants have no protected right to legal representation, make it very clear this is the Justice Department’s purpose for modifying the policy in the first place.
“Joyce Vance, a former United States Attorney, who is now a law professor and a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC, warned Tuesday about the possible implications on her blog Civil Discourse:
“It could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers?” Vance wrote. “All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone.”
“Anyone could be prioritized,” Shah said. “It’s really chilling.”
Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western University, told NPR that it was “especially concerning” that the administration would plan to pursue denaturalization through civil court.
“Civil denaturalization cases provide no right to an attorney, meaning defendants without resources often face the government without representation,” she wrote in a 2019 study on the history of denaturalization along with her colleague Irina Manta. “There are no jury trials, with judges making citizenship determinations alone. The burden of proof is ‘clear and convincing evidence’ rather than the criminal standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ Additionally, there is no statute of limitations, allowing the government to build cases on decades-old evidence that may be incomplete or unreliable.”
So, let’s be clear about what’s going on here. The Justice Department wants to strip the citizenship of foreign-born Americans, based on vague national security or fraudulent representation concerns only the Trump regime itself can define. Furthermore, if they can convince one potentially partisan judge that they’re right because you can’t afford a lawyer, you’re on your way to “Alligator Alcatraz” or South Sudan in a matter of days. If that sounds a little bit like McCarthyism to you, that’s probably because the last time the United States did anything like this was during the Second Red Scare; apparently we’re making America HUAC again. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it; as if to demonstrate the point that this is objectively fascist ideological policing, members of the Republican Party have recently mused about using these Justice Department guidelines to target the Democratic Party nominee for the upcoming New York City mayoral election.
“Republican politicians have not been shy about calling for their political opponents to be stripped of citizenship. Last week, following Zohran Mamdani’s shocking victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) called for the Ugandan-born state assemblyman to be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and “deported,” referring to him as an “antisemitic, socialist, communist.”
Ogles accused Mamdani of failing to disclose his political “affiliations or sympathies” during the process that led him to become a citizen in 2018. He singled out Mamdani’s support for the Holy Land Foundation, whose leaders were convicted in a widely criticized “terrorism financing” case in 2008. Notably, the leaders of the group were never accused of directly funding terrorist groups or terrorist acts.”
So, is any of this fascist bullshit actually legal? Probably not; in 1967 the US Supreme Court seriously curtailed the government’s ability to weaponize the denaturalization process under the quite reasonable argument that The Fourteenth Amendment isn’t a suggestion, and American citizenship isn’t awarded on a tiering system that disadvantages foreign-born citizens. Unfortunately, the Trump regime appears to have the full backing of a modern, 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court that doesn’t care about precedent, and has already taken actions that will allow Trump to specifically violate the Fourteenth Amendment to at least temporarily cancel birthright citizenship. In other words, I wouldn’t count on the Roberts Court to put a stop to any of this if I were you. Furthermore, the simple truth is that any fascist policy that allows the Trump regime to violate the US constitution and human rights law to target migrants is ultimately a fascist policy that can be used to target anyone. After all, one way for a fascist government to make good on its threat to ship even American-born citizens to a torture prison in El Salvador, would be to strip their citizenship first under the guise of fighting “terrorism” and thereby create stateless people who have no rights.
Folks, if this doesn’t terrify you I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention to the nightmare unfolding around us in Trump’s brave new Amerikkka. Historically, denaturalization policies have lead to some of the worst atrocities in Pig Empire history, including, you guessed it, the actual fucking Holocaust. If that sounds like scaremongering to you please let me remind you that we are currently bragging about building a concentration camp surrounded by migrant-eating alligators, and the Supreme Court has more or less signaled its willingness to let the Trump regime at least temporarily ignore the constitution to commit life-destroying human rights violations against non-citizens. How much longer do you think it’s going to take these fascist pigs to figure out that deportation flights are more expensive than bullets, or even just letting underfed people die in remote internment camps, far away from the public eye? We are through the looking glass now, and waiting until we’re finding mass graves outside of ICE facilities to recognize a rapidly escalating ethnonationalist genocide being conducted under the guise of immigration enforcement is an unacceptable course of action.
It’s time for folks who are not yet being targeted by the regime to make some hard choices, and I have no right to tell anyone else how to make them. What I can tell you is that in the long history of fascist oppression and genocide, the record has never been kind to cowards or collaborators. Whatever those of us who aren’t fascists decide to do next, we’d best be prepared to explain those decisions to our grandchildren because nothing will ever be the same about America after that, either way.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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