Writing in 1958, Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, compared stripping someone of their citizenship to torture. He argued that “Citizenship is not a license that expires upon misbehavior. And the deprivation of citizenship is not a weapon that the Government may use to express its displeasure at a citizen's conduct, however reprehensible that conduct may be.”
You would never know that from the way the Trump Administration has been trying to use that weapon. They are apparently determined to use it against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a naturalized citizen and vocal critic of the president.
She has been on his enemies' list for a long time.
This effort came to light after Homeland Security agents carried out a predawn search of her home on October 12. They obtained a warrant alleging immigration fraud and false statements in conjunction with her naturalization process.
Targeting Omar is precisely the sort of thing Warren had in mind when he warned against the perils of government efforts to use deprivation of citizenship to punish people who offend or displease powerful public officials. All of us have a stake in this case.
It is blatantly unconstitutional and cruel, and it is another shameful episode in the saga of the Trump presidency.
USA Today notes that Omar is not alone in being targeted for denaturalization. “The Trump administration has spent the past year reviving denaturalization, a legal tool once reserved mostly for war criminals and terrorism suspects.”
“For decades,” it adds, “the government averaged about 11 such cases a year…. Since Trump returned to office, the Justice Department has filed at least 163 cases and set a goal of 250 this month.”
He ramped up denaturalization efforts on the first day of his second term when he signed an Executive Order that directed the Secretary of State, in coordination with the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Director of National Intelligence, to "ensure the devotion of adequate resources to identify and take appropriate action for offenses described in 8 U.S.C. § 1451."
Six months later, Brett Shumate, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, ordered lawyers in that division to ramp up denaturalization proceedings. Civil denaturalization is an easier route than doing it as a criminal punishment. It avoids the restriction imposed by the Supreme Court in 1958, since in that case the loss of citizenship was imposed as a punishment for the commission of a crime.
And according to the New York Times, in December 2025, the Trump Administration directed “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices…(to) ‘supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month’ in the 2026 fiscal year.”
Congress has laid out a series of circumstances under which denaturalization can occur in a provision of the law known as “8 U.S.C. § 1451.” One of those circumstances is if the “certificate of naturalization…(is) illegally procured or (was) procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation…”
This seems to be the basis on which the Trump Administration hopes to strip Rep. Omar of her citizenship. They allege that she lied about her age to obtain citizenship through her father’s naturalization, “a route open only to children under 18. Investigators are trying to determine whether the family misstated her birth date so she would qualify….”
The denaturalization law, 8 U.S.C. § 1451, states that someone can lose their citizenship if their “certificate of naturalization (was) illegally procured or…procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”
Echoing the concerns of another era, it also states that someone can be denaturalized if they “become a member of or affiliated with any organization, membership in or affiliation with which at the time of naturalization would have precluded such person from naturalization… (and indicates) that such person was not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization….”
Professor Patrick Weil recalls that during World War I, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson denaturalized German citizens as well as anarchists and people who opposed the war. And, during World War II, the Roosevelt Administration stripped the citizenship of people who were members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund.
However, in 1943, the Supreme Court clamped down on denaturalization efforts when it rejected the government’s effort to denaturalize “an admitted member of the Communist Party of the United States.” As Justice Frank Murphy explained, “We are… a heterogeneous people…who sought refuge in the new world from the cruelty and oppression of the old, where men have been burned at the stake, imprisoned, and driven into exile in countless numbers for their political and religious beliefs.”
“Here,” Murphy said, “they have hoped to achieve a political status as citizens in a free world in which men are privileged to think and act and speak according to their convictions, without fear of punishment or further exile so long as they keep the peace and obey the law.”
All Americans should heed Murphy’s words even if the Trump Administration does not.
Murphy warned that allowing the government “to turn the clock back” after citizenship is granted “is more serious than a taking of one's property, or the imposition of a fine or other penalty. For it is safe to assert that nowhere in the world today is the right of citizenship of greater worth to an individual than it is in this country.”
For people around the world, Murphy observed, American citizenship “is regarded as the highest hope of civilized men.”
Today, because of what the Trump Administration has done and is doing, that may no longer be as true as it once was. That is one sign of the terrible price this country is paying for having elected Trump president.
One way of describing that price is to recall what Chief Justice Warren said about the loss of citizenship. It “destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development,” and amounts to taking away “the right to have rights.”
If the Trump Administration can do that to Ilhan Omar, it will send a chilling message to the 26 million naturalized citizens in this country that they, too, can lose that right if and when they behave in ways that offend the president and his cronies. None of us, no matter our citizenship status, should want to live under such a regime, a regime that, in the words of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, is displaying the signs of what she called “totalitarian infection.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
