Revocation of Citizenship, a Very Serious Matter

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Trump seems to have been banging his gums and his thumbs lately over the idea of revoking citizenship.  He has no qualms about rounding up people with dark skin and locking them in concentration camps, and then deporting them to foreign gulags - sometimes in countries to which the accused (but seldom tried) prisoners have no historic connection.  

Generally Trump's immigration victims are non-citizens of the US and have only limited rights  - but they do have a right to due process, to be allowed to know the charges against them and to present a rebuttal to those charges, something an authoritarian regime would see as needless delay of the inevitable.

Some non-citizen immigrants are here as refugees and have been granted certain court-protections to keep them safe, but are being grabbed by the new ICE army anyway - see Kilmar Abrego Garcia as an example - and others are US citizens by birth but are minors in the custody of parents who are not US citizens and are being involuntarily removed "under duress" in order to remain with their parents.

What is not happening - yet - is that US citizens are not having their citizenship revoked in order to deport them or keep them abroad.   But, never fear, the Trump administration is making noises about going there as well.

Trump's first two threats are against Rosie O'Donnell, a celebrity with whom Trump has fueded for twenty years, and Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner candidate for mayor of New York City.

Rosie O'Donnell was born in the United States to parents who were citizens.  She is a US citizen by birth. A few years ago she and her partner and their children relocated to Ireland in order to avoid the stresses of life under Trump.  That was undoubtedly mox nix to Trump, but when he needs a quick distraction to draw social media sites away from things like the Epstein files, Rosie is an easy target for his bellicose ravings.  He uses his presidential bully pulpit to threaten to have her citizenship revoked - but can Trump do that?

The answer is a resounding "No."  The citizenship of all natural born Americans - like Rosie O'Donnell or any child born in this country to parents who aren't legal US citizens - are guaranteed in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Zohran Mamdani, the young New York politician whom Trump routinely smears as being a "communist" (just as he did to Kamala Harris), is a different matter.   Mamdani was"naturalized" by an immigration court as a US citizen when he was seven-years-old, and he has a dual citizenhip in Uganda.  Naturalized citizens can have their citizenship revoked or become "denaturalized" through a court action if they obtained their citizenship through fraud or misrepresentation.

It would probably difficult to build a legal case arguing that a seven-year-old outsmarted an immigration judge - but in Trump's America, who knows?  

It would be much easier to prove if Mamdani had come to America on an "Einstein Visa" (EB-1A) claiming to have some exceptional training or ability, and then gone to work as an underwear model.  Citizenship based on an Einstein Visa that was itself was based on fraud, might just qualify for a revocation of naturalized citizenship.

Maintaining citizenship is an extremely serious matter and it should not be reduced the whinings and whims of some petulant narcissist.  No kings!