When citizenship becomes conditional: Trump’s denaturalization campaign and the white-nationalist idea of who belongs
The Trump administration says it is targeting criminals and fraudsters. But the deeper danger lies in the idea that some Americans—especially those born elsewhere—can be permanently marked as less authentically American.
The Trump administration’s expanding campaign to revoke the citizenship of naturalized Americans is being presented as a straightforward matter of law and order. The administration says it is targeting people who committed serious crimes, concealed criminal histories or defrauded the government in obtaining citizenship.
The Justice Department has filed denaturalization actions against dozens of naturalized citizens in 2026, including people accused of sexual abuse, fraud, drug trafficking, terrorism-related offenses and war crimes (U.S. Department of Justice 2026a, 2026b). Internal guidance reported by The New York Times (Aleaziz 2025) directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices to refer 100 to 200 potential denaturalization cases per month to the Justice Department during fiscal year 2026—a dramatic escalation from the historical use of denaturalization as a rare legal remedy. (Reuters 2025).
There is an important legal distinction here. Under federal law, citizenship can be revoked when the government proves in court that naturalization was illegally procured or obtained through concealment of a material fact or direct and awareness of a willful misrepresentation. The existence of this legal power is not itself new. What is new, and deeply troubling here, is the administration’s effort to transform an exceptional remedy into a central instrument of immigration enforcement.
The question is not whether a person who deliberately lied to obtain citizenship should face legal consequences. The question is what happens when the government begins treating citizenship itself as a revocable privilege—one that can be withdrawn from people whom officials decide are morally unworthy, politically disloyal or insufficiently American.
That question reaches beyond immigration law. It goes to the heart of the white-nationalist imagination.
The language of “real” Americans
The administration’s rhetoric is revealing. President Donald Trump has repeatedly spoken of citizenship as something that can be deserved or forfeited. Officials have described citizenship as a “privilege” rather than emphasizing its character as a fundamental legal status.
The Justice Department has framed naturalized citizenship as a “privilege” that can be forfeited by people who, in the government’s view, lied or concealed criminal conduct during the naturalization process. In a June 2026 announcement, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described the targets as “criminal aliens” who had allegedly lied about their past crimes, while the department said that “gaining U.S. citizenship is a privilege.” (U.S. Department of Justice 2026a)
That language matters because it quietly changes the meaning of citizenship.
In a constitutional democracy, citizenship is not supposed to be a reward granted by the government for permanent good behavior. Citizens can commit crimes. They can lie. They can be cruel, corrupt, violent or profoundly disloyal to the political leadership of the moment. The ordinary response to those acts is criminal prosecution, imprisonment, fines or other lawful penalties—not the destruction of the individual’s membership in the political community.
Denaturalization is different. It says that the individual was never truly entitled to belong.
That distinction creates a dangerous category of person: the citizen who is legally American but whose membership can be retroactively questioned. And because the current political campaign is directed specifically at naturalized citizens, it creates a second distinction between Americans who were born into citizenship and Americans who had to apply for it.
The result is a hierarchy of belonging.
This is precisely the kind of hierarchy that has historically been a central part of white nationalism: the belief that the nation is not fundamentally a political community of equal citizens but an inherited cultural group, racial membership or possession of civilization. In that worldview, some people are naturally American while others remain conditional Americans, perpetually required to prove their loyalty, gratitude and worthiness.
White nationalism does not always announce itself as white supremacy
White nationalism is often misunderstood as requiring explicit declarations of racial superiority. In practice, it frequently operates through a more subtle claim: that the nation belongs only to a particular ethnic or cultural group and that other people may be admitted only conditionally.
Rogers Brubaker, a prominent American sociologist at UCLA whose research examines citizenship, immigration, nationalism, ethnicity, race, identity and populism, has described this kind of politics as a struggle over the boundaries of national membership and belonging (Brubaker 1992). Citizenship, in this analysis, is not simply a legal status. It becomes a mechanism for defining who is part of the national “we.”
The historian Mae Ngai has shown how American immigration law has repeatedly transformed racial and ethnic boundaries into legal categories, deciding who could enter, who could become a citizen and who could be excluded (Ngai 2004). The history of American citizenship is therefore not separate from race. It has been shaped by racial assumptions about who could assimilate, who could be trusted and who could legitimately belong.
The contemporary denaturalization campaign fits within this longer history even when its official language is presented by advocates as race-neutral.
A policy does not need to say “white people are the real Americans” to reproduce a system in which whiteness functions as the unspoken baseline of belonging. If the American-born citizen is presumed to possess an irrevocable membership while the foreign-born citizen must continually demonstrate that membership, the legal distinction itself becomes racialized and exclusionary in practice.
This is one reason the administration’s rhetoric about “fraudsters,” “criminal aliens” and people who supposedly should never have become Americans deserves scrutiny. The problem is not that serious crimes should be ignored. The problem is the political construction of a category of people whose citizenship is treated as inherently suspect simply because they were born somewhere else. Similar rhetoric has also been used to justify aggressive immigration and ICE crackdowns, policies that have resulted in deaths and other serious human costs.
From punishment to expulsion
A criminal conviction ordinarily means that the state has punished a person for a specific act. Denaturalization can do something much broader. It can transform a criminal act into evidence that the person was never truly entitled to be American in the first place.
That is a profound conceptual shift.
A naturalized citizen who commits a crime can already be prosecuted and imprisoned. If the government also seeks to revoke citizenship, the punishment is not simply for the crime. It is also for the person’s status as a naturalized citizen.
The administration’s approach thus risks creating a two-tier system of citizenship. Native-born citizens may be convicted of serious crimes and serve their sentences as Americans. Naturalized citizens may face an additional punishment: the loss of the country to which they legally belong.
The legal system is supposed to distinguish between criminal punishment and immigration consequences. The Trump administration’s approach increasingly seeks to collapse them.
The danger is especially acute when the government’s definition of disqualifying conduct expands. The Justice Department has prioritized cases involving national security, human rights abuses, undisclosed felonies and other categories of alleged misconduct. The administration has also used broad language about people who undermine “domestic tranquility” or are incompatible with “Western Civilization.”
Such language is a warning sign. “Fraud” is a legal category. “Criminality” can be defined through statutes and convictions. But “domestic tranquility,” cultural compatibility and civilizational belonging are elastic political concepts.
They can be used to describe almost anyone whom a government considers undesirable.
The historical shadow of denationalization
History demonstrates why citizenship revocation is so dangerous.
States have repeatedly used denationalization to turn political opponents and minority populations into people who can be expelled. In Europe during the 20th century, citizenship stripping became one of the tools through which states transformed minorities from citizens into foreigners. The Nazi regime’s racial laws made citizenship dependent upon racial ancestry and political loyalty, demonstrating the catastrophic consequences of treating national membership as a revocable gift of the state.
The United States has its own history of racialized citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion era, the internment of Japanese Americans and the long struggle over who could become a citizen all demonstrate that legal citizenship has never been entirely separate from racial hierarchy (Ngai 2004; Daniels 2004).
The lesson is not that contemporary denaturalization proceedings are identical to Nazi Germany or any other historical episode. Such comparisons can obscure more than they clarify. The lesson is that the seemingly technical power to decide who is “really” a citizen can become a mechanism for racial and political exclusion.
White supremacist movements understand this intuitively.
For decades, white nationalist organizations have argued that the United States is fundamentally a white nation and that immigration represents not merely a demographic change but an existential threat. Their central concern is often not simply illegal immigration. It is the possibility that nonwhite people will become full and equal participants in the national community.
The “replacement” narrative makes this explicit: the claim that white Americans are being displaced by immigrants and people of color. The more subtle version of the same idea is that citizenship should not be enough. A person may possess an American passport, vote, pay taxes, serve in the military and live in the country for decades—and still be treated as less authentically American than someone born to the right parents in the right place.
That is the ideological bridge between contemporary denaturalization rhetoric and white nationalism.
The political function of fear
Even if only a small number of denaturalization cases ultimately succeed, the campaign can have a much broader effect.
The Brennan Center has warned that the administration’s denaturalization campaign can create fear among naturalized citizens even though the legal barriers to stripping citizenship remain high. The government does not need to revoke the citizenship of millions of people to produce this effect; as Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron argue, a small number of highly publicized cases could be enough to cast “a pall of uncertainty” over naturalized citizens and make them fear that saying the wrong thing could make them the next target (Patel and O’Herron 2025).
That fear can discourage political participation.
A naturalized citizen who believes that criticism of the president, participation in a protest or association with a controversial organization could somehow place their citizenship at risk may reasonably become more cautious. A government does not need to formally criminalize dissent to chill it. The uncertainty itself can become a form of political control.
This is especially important because citizenship is supposed to provide security against precisely this kind of governmental intimidation. The point of citizenship is that the state cannot simply decide that someone no longer belongs because the person has become politically inconvenient.
The Supreme Court has historically placed significant limits on the government’s ability to strip citizenship, particularly when political beliefs or political activity are involved. Legal scholars have also emphasized that denaturalization requires a high standard of proof and cannot simply be used as a general punishment for bad behavior. (Patel and O’Herron 2025).
But constitutional protections are not self-enforcing. They depend upon institutions willing to resist political pressure.
The most important question is not who is targeted first
The administration’s defenders will argue that the current targets are people accused or convicted of serious crimes. Some may indeed have committed horrific offenses. That fact should not be minimized.
But the history of state power teaches a basic lesson: policies should not be judged only by the first people against whom they are used.
The crucial question is what principle the government is establishing.
If the principle is that citizenship may be revoked when it was fraudulently obtained, then the law should be applied narrowly, with rigorous judicial oversight and clear proof that the alleged misrepresentation was material to the acquisition of citizenship.
If the principle becomes that citizenship may be revoked because a naturalized citizen later commits a crime, is deemed disloyal or is considered insufficiently compatible with the dominant culture, then the country has moved into a different and far more dangerous territory.
It has begun to treat citizenship as conditional.
And conditional citizenship is fundamentally incompatible with equal citizenship.
The white-nationalist idea of America is a nation in which some people are presumed to belong and others must continually prove that they deserve to remain. The democratic idea of America is different. It is not based on blood, ancestry or an official judgment that one has achieved sufficient cultural purity. It is based on equal membership in a political community.
The Trump administration’s denaturalization campaign should therefore be understood not simply as an immigration enforcement initiative. It is part of a larger struggle over what American citizenship means.
The most dangerous question is not whether some naturalized citizens have committed crimes. Of course some have.
The dangerous question is whether the government is slowly reviving an older idea: that citizenship is not a permanent status of equal membership but a privilege that the state—and ultimately the political movement controlling the state—can decide whether you deserve.
That idea has deep roots in white supremacy.
And history shows where it can lead.
References
Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Daniels, Roger. 2004. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill and Wang.
Ngai, Mae M. 2004. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Patel, Faiza, and Margy O’Herron. 2025. “Stripping Naturalized Americans of Citizenship Faces High Legal Hurdles.” Brennan Center for Justice, October 24, 2025.
Zalc, Claire. 2021. The Faces of Inequality: A History of the Political Economy of Citizenship. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Reporting and legal sources
Aleaziz, Hamed. 2025. “Trump Administration Aims to Strip More Foreign-Born Americans of Citizenship.” The New York Times, December 17, 2025.
Congressional Research Service. 2026. “Denaturalization: Legal Authorities and Recent Executive Branch Efforts.”
Migration Policy Institute. 2026. “From Last Resort to Intimidating Enforcement Tool: Denaturalization in the Trump Era.”
Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. 2026. “Trump Administration Launches Largest-Ever Effort to Denaturalize U.S. Citizens Accused of Fraud or Other Crimes.” CBS News.
Reuters. 2025. “Trump administration seeks to ramp up denaturalization of some U.S. citizens, New York Times reports.” December 17, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-seeks-ramp-up-denaturalization-some-us-citizens-new-york-2025-12-17/
U.S. Department of Justice. 2026a. “Justice Department Moves to Strip U.S. Citizenship from 17 Naturalized Sex Offenders, Fraudsters, Drug Dealers, and More.” June 8, 2026.
U.S. Department of Justice. 2026b. “Justice Department Moves to Revoke U.S. Citizenship from 10 Naturalized Criminals Including Child Molesters, Scammers, and Drug Dealers.” July 20, 2026.
U.S. Department of Justice. 2026c. “Justice Department Moves to Denaturalize 12 Individuals for Concealing Terrorist Support, War Crimes, Espionage, Sexual Abuse, and More.” May 8, 2026.