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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The Trump administration is ramping up efforts to strip more naturalized immigrants of their U.S. citizenship. That’s according to a report in The New York Times, which found internal guidance issued this week to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices asked that they supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100 to 200 denaturalization cases per month in the next fiscal year. The Times reports it would represent a “massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era.”
The news comes less than two weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case to decide the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship.
To talk about all of this, as well as the latest threat by the Trump administration, that was issued last night, to end the visa diversity program, which leads to a green card for so many, we’re joined now by Mae Ngai, professor of Asian American studies and history at Columbia University. Much of her work focuses on immigration, citizenship and nationalism.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor Ngai. It’s great to have you with us. Let’s start off —
MAE NGAI: Thanks for having me, Amy. Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain for people who don’t quite understand: What is it to be a naturalized citizen? And then, what does it mean that the Trump administration wants to revoke that citizenship from 100 to 200 people a month?
MAE NGAI: The United States has two kinds of citizens: those who are born in this country, who are automatically citizens by birth — that’s what we call birthright citizenship — and naturalized citizens, those people who are immigrants who can apply to become a citizen after they’ve been here for five years, take a test on civics, have no criminal record, etc.
The Constitution treats both kinds of citizens equally. Birthright citizens and naturalized citizens are treated the same under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. And we have naturalized close to 10 million people in the last 10 years, so there’s a large number of foreign-born Americans who are citizens of this country. Now, to give you some context —
AMY GOODMAN: The mayor-elect —
MAE NGAI: — on what does it mean to — yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: The mayor-elect of New York — right? — Zohran Mamdani, is a naturalized citizen. He was born in Uganda.
MAE NGAI: That’s right, and Trump has explicitly threatened to strip Mamdani of his citizenship.
AMY GOODMAN: So, keep going with your explanation now.
MAE NGAI: OK. So, to give you some context, what does it mean to say they want 100 to 200 cases per month? During the first Trump administration, they had 25 cases per year, and before that, for the 15 years before the first Trump administration, they had fewer than 15 cases per year. So this is an incredible escalation.
I want to say that it’s doubtful that they can actually do this, that they can bring that many cases, or that they can successfully prosecute that many cases. But it’s like the mass deportation program. You know, they have no way to reach their goal of 3,000 ICE arrests per month, but they have spread terror and fear throughout immigrant communities, and now that is going to spread to our fellow citizens who are naturalized.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how does this happen? How does it start? If I were a naturalized citizen, I get a notice that I am going to lose my citizenship?
MAE NGAI: No, they can’t do that. DHS or Citizen Immigration Services cannot unilaterally revoke your citizenship. They have to go to a U.S. attorney, and they — the U.S. Attorney’s Office has to file a suit, a civil suit, in federal court, and it has to go before a judge. So it’s a long process. Every individual case has to be tried.
And let me say, Amy, the grounds to denaturalize a citizen are very, very narrow, very narrow indeed. You have to show that the citizen lied on their application in a way that was meaningful to the outcome. So, for example, we mostly know about people who were war criminals, who hid their past, people who were members of the Nazi Party during World War II. Those are the most famous cases. So, you have to have misrepresented yourself and hidden or committed fraud on your application about something that would have been consequential.
Now, in June, the Trump administration expanded the list of reasons why they could revoke somebody’s naturalization. These include association with gangs or cartels, people who have been involved in human trafficking, people who have committed financial fraud against the government or private individuals or entities. That’s an interesting one. And so, they have expanded the grounds considerably.
And speaking of Mamdani, I think one of the things we have to be very concerned about is their use of political difference with the Trump administration. I can imagine that they will selectively try to prosecute American citizens who are naturalized who have spoken out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. You know, Mamdani has been accused of being, you know, a Hamas supporter, which is not true, but he does support Palestine. So, this is going to be, I think, a new ground upon which we see the struggle for political speech.
AMY GOODMAN: You say that both birthright citizenship and naturalized citizenship are protected by the 14th Amendment. So, go now to birthright citizenship and what’s going before the Supreme Court.
MAE NGAI: On day one of Trump taking office, he declared he was going to deny birthright citizenship to babies born to undocumented migrants and temporary immigrants, people like foreign students or guest workers. Now, this has been challenged in the courts, it’s been turned down by several circuit courts, and now it’s before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear it. And this is something that has over a hundred years of precedence in our country, and this would be a terrible blow if Trump were to — or, if the Supreme Court were to uphold Trump’s executive order.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what birthright citizenship is.
MAE NGAI: It simply means that any person born on the soil of the United States, save for those who are born to foreign diplomats or an invading army, which we don’t have that circumstance, but anybody born on U.S. soil is, by that fact, a citizen of the United States. And there are, I think, some 300,000 babies born every year to people who are undocumented or temporary immigrants, who have citizenship.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to —
MAE NGAI: I’m a birthright citizen, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain. Explain, Professor Ngai.
MAE NGAI: My friends were immigrants.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain, Professor Ngai.
MAE NGAI: But I’m a birthright — well, I was born in this country. I was born in the Bronx. My parents were immigrants. They had come from China. And they later became naturalized citizens, but the time I was born, they were immigrants. And I was born here, and so I’m a citizen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go to President Trump speaking from the White House in June about his plans to end birthright citizenship.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis. And some of the cases we’re talking about would be ending birthright citizenship, which now comes to the fore. That was meant for the babies of slaves. It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation. This was — in fact, it was the same date, the exact same date, the end of the Civil War. It was meant for the babies of slaves. And it’s so clean and so obvious. But this lets us go there and finally win that case, because hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our country under birthright citizenship, and it wasn’t meant for that reason.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what it’s meant for, Professor Ngai.
MAE NGAI: Well, it was originally meant for the babies of the former slaves, that is true. But it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898 in a Chinese case called Wong Kim Ark. And the court said that it applied to the children of immigrants, as well, including Chinese immigrants, which the court had no great love for. And at that time, the court said, if we eliminate birthright citizenship for the Chinese, the citizenship of all the children of all the Europeans who’ve come here would be in jeopardy. So the court knew that this was a far-reaching provision of the Constitution, and it upheld it. And it’s been upheld, you know, ever since.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go what happened just last night. The Trump administration has suspended the diversity visa lottery program in the wake of the mass shooting at Brown University and the murder of the MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro. The suspect, which seems to be the same person in both cases, was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility, a self-inflicted wound, named Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. He entered the country on a student visa in 2000. He went to Brown, apparently, as a physics graduate student, was in that building where the young people were shot up this past weekend. So, he got a visa, a student visa, in 2000 and then apparently was granted a green card through the visa diversity program in 2017. Now the Trump administration is saying, based on this one person, they’re going to end this? What exactly is the diversity visa program, what’s called a green card program, and what would it mean?
MAE NGAI: First of all, I want to say that it’s utter tragedy, what happened at Brown and at MIT. And this is typical of the Trump administration to weaponize unfortunate instances like this to pursue a different agenda. The diversity visa program was passed by Congress in 1990. It allows for 50,000 green cards to be given to people in a lottery system. Now, people may know that the regular system, you have to have a family member in this country or a guarantee of employment from an employer. So, the diversity option through the lottery is just for anybody.
Now, they instituted that in 1990 in the hopes of bringing in more white people, Irish, you know, Eastern Europeans, etc. But what happened in the diversity was that a lot of people who got the lottery were from Africa or other countries. So, there have been calls in Congress to get rid of it, because it’s not what it was intended for, which was to make the immigration stream more white.
And I think all of these things are just indices of the Trump administration’s bigger agenda, which is to make this country a white Christian nation. To strip people of their citizenship, they’re going to go after certain kinds of people. Obviously, we see in the mass deportation system, we see in their end to the amnesty programs and refugee programs, and we see in the attempt to eliminate the diversity — which actually has to be done by Congress. But, you know, they do all these things because they don’t like the color or the politics of the people who come to this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Last quick question, a federal judge this week ruled the Trump administration broke the law by limiting congressmembers’ access to ICE jails. Can you talk about the significance of this? We have 20 seconds.
MAE NGAI: Well, the Trump administration acts with no oversight whatsoever, whether it’s the Supreme Court or Congress. He is acting like a dictator, an authoritarian. And it’s just a terrible thing, and the American people have to protest and oppose these.
AMY GOODMAN: Mae Ngai, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of Asian American studies and history at Columbia University, author of several books, including the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
That does it for our show. Democracy Now! currently accepting applications for our video news production and digital fellowship programs. Learn more at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
