It’s another day as an immigrant in Trump’s America. The latest group under threat: U.S. citizens.
Recently, the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice had identified 384 more cases for denaturalization, the process of revoking citizenship. This comes months after President Trump instructed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to produce 200 denaturalization referrals per month. For context, denaturalization was rare: there were a total of 305 cases between 1990 and 2017. During Trump’s first term, 168 cases were filed over just four years.
The push to “prioritize denaturalization” threatens the security of Americans and undermines citizenship as a legal status. The Trump administration has made it clear that assimilation, service to one’s country, or even an American seal on your passport offers no guarantees. This erosion of immigration protections is not abstract. While much of the discourse has been focused on “illegal” immigrants, week by week, official policies are undercutting legal pathways to live in the U.S.
In a memo published January 1st, USCIS placed a hold on processing applications for people from 39 countries deemed "high-risk.” Last year, over 1 million people had their temporary protected status (TPS) revoked. TPS is not a path to citizenship, but authorizes people to live and work in the U.S. whose home country is too dangerous to return to. Those who were granted TPS undergo background checks and careful review of their status for renewal. Still, there are ongoing efforts to terminate TPS eligibility for more countries.
Not only are the bureaucratic processes for living and working in this country becoming narrower and more punitive, but citizenship itself is being redefined. This year, the Supreme Court will decide if President Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship is constitutional.
Denaturalization would affect people like me who were born in another country and became naturalized citizens. I remember sitting with my parents in front of a judge on the day it happened. As a kid, the gravity of that moment didn’t really dawn on me. I didn’t feel American, even if I would soon have the passport to prove it.
My family immigrated to the U.S. when I was a toddler. Despite my pursuit of Americanness, my otherness had clear giveaways: my name, my skin color, the contents of my brown paper bag lunch. But on trips back to India, I was teased for being too American: my accent, the way I dressed, how I styled my hair.
Stories like this are common among “third culture” kids: those raised in a culture different from their parents’. We internalize the idea that if we adapt, integrate, and perform as Americans, we will be accepted. We're taught that belonging is conditional. This is a hard lesson to learn as a child, and it is painful to revisit as an adult.
Experts have commented that Trump’s goal of 200 denaturalization cases per month is an unlikely scenario, as it only applies to fraudulent applications or other specific circumstances. This provides little reassurance when the administration’s definition of fraud can be contorted to fit its agenda. Ultimately, the message of this directive is clear: even if you came to the U.S. “the right way,” it can all be taken away.
These policies will also deter would-be immigrants. By the end of President Trump’s second term, his policies are projected to reduce legal immigration by 50%, and the consequences can't be overstated. Almost a fifth of our civilian labor force is foreign-born. We make up 24% of entrepreneurs, 26% of construction workers, and 26% of physicians (myself included). We subsidize the cost of our healthcare system and pay more in taxes per capita than the average U.S.-born citizen. Between 1994-2023, immigrants created a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion. The value of immigrants is immeasurable, but their economic impact may be the only argument that resonates with this administration.
When citizenship can be questioned or revoked, there is no assurance that a US passport will make us American enough.
Tushara Surapaneni, MD, is a board-certified emergency medicine physician and Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.