ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens
ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens

ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens

How did your country report this? Share your view in the comments.

Diverging Reports Breakdown

Roberts, Murphy defend Misiorowski ‘s selection to NL All-Star roster

Jacob Misiorowski is 4-1 with a 2.81 ERA for the Milwaukee Brewers. The 23-year-old threw a 100.5 mph fastball for his first pitch in the big leagues. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts sees the move as a positive, given the entertainment value of the Midsummer Classic. Brewers manager Pat Murphy says he understands the backlash from around the league but sees it as giving fans what they want. The All-Star game will be held Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia, with the winner going to the World Series.

Read full article ▼
SAN FRANCISCO — The addition of Milwaukee Brewers rookie phenom pitcher Jacob Misiorowski to the National League All-Star team drew mixed reactions around Major League Baseball. Some players and fans quickly took to social media to express their frustrations over a player with only five starts in the majors being added to the NL roster instead of other players who have put up as good, if not better, numbers during the first half of the season.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who will manage the NL squad Tuesday in Atlanta, is on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Advertisement Advertisement

Advertisement Advertisement

Roberts made it clear that he had no voice in selecting Misiorowski but sees the move as a positive, given the entertainment value of the Midsummer Classic.

Advertisement

“The All-Star game is about the fans,” Roberts said. “Yes, this kid hasn’t pitched a whole lot in the big leagues but I do think it sparks some more excitement, seeing the velocity.”

The 23-year-old, who is 4-1 with a 2.81 ERA, quickly gained attention when he threw a 100.5 mph fastball for his first pitch in the big leagues.

Brewers manager Pat Murphy said he understood the backlash from around the league but sees it as giving fans what they want.

“People want to see Miz pitch,” Murphy said. “He’s the new shiny toy in the league. It’s not deserving, that has nothing to do with it. He’s been given this opportunity. It’s not his fault.

“This wasn’t a fly by night decision. This is something they thought through. I think it would be really tough for the kid to say no to that.”

Advertisement

Murphy likened Misiorowski to former Detroit Tigers pitcher Mark ‘The Bird’ Fidrych.

Fidrych was an All-Star his first two seasons in the majors, a unique player who would often talk to his glove while on the mound.

Fans embraced Fidrych and his eccentricities because he had the stuff on the mound to back it up. He pitched 24 complete games as a rookie in 1976, including back-to-back games when he logged 11 innings each time.

“From what I know of The Bird, it just seems that he was really authentic and really super talented,” Murphy said. “There’s some parallels there for sure.”

Source: Washingtonpost.com | View original article

ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens

U.S. immigration officers may deport immigrants with as little as six hours’ notice to countries other than their own. A Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately’ start sending immigrants to ‘alternative’ countries. People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice, ICE official writes in a memo to the workforce. The United States has rarely deported people to countrieswhere they are not citizens, and lawyers warned that thousands of longtime immigrants could now be uprooted and sent to places where they lack family ties or even a common language. It is not clear how many immigrants are at risk of being deported or where they might be deported. The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the memo on Saturday, or about the deportation procedures in the memo.

Read full article ▼
Federal immigration officers may deport immigrants with as little as six hours’ notice to countries other than their own even if officials have not provided any assurances that the new arrivals will be safe from persecution or torture, a top official said in a memo this week. Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.

People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.

Advertisement Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement Advertisement

If the State Department “believes those assurances to be credible,” then ICE may deport someone to that country “without the need for further procedures,” he wrote in the memo, obtained by The Washington Post.

The United States has rarely deported people to countries where they are not citizens, and lawyers warned that thousands of longtime immigrants with work permits and families in the U.S. could now be uprooted and sent to places where they lack family ties or even a common language.

Among those who could be targeted are thousands of immigrants with final removal orders who have not been deported to their native countries because a judge found that they might face danger there. Others are those with deportation orders to countries such as China or Cuba that do not always cooperate with deportations because of their frosty relationship to the U.S.

Advertisement

Immigrants who state a fear of being deported will be screened for possible protection, Lyons wrote, but immigration lawyers said the government’s plan does not give immigrants enough time to assess the danger they might face in a country that the government has selected for them.

“It puts thousands of lives at risk of persecution and torture,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which is challenging the third-country removals on behalf of immigrants in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts.

Advertisement Advertisement

The alliance filed the lawsuit in March arguing that the U.S. government was violating federal law and sending immigrants to places where they could be harmed or killed, without giving them a chance to argue against it, including a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico, where he had been kidnapped and raped.

Advertisement

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy barred the government from removing immigrants without giving them a “meaningful” opportunity to challenge it. On June 23, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority paused the judge’s decision in a brief, unsigned statement that did not explain its reasoning, but it cleared the way for the removals to resume.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote a stinging dissent with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that the court’s decision would put people at risk. “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution,” she wrote. “In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.”

Since President Donald Trump took office promising mass deportations, officials have sent immigrants from Venezuela to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador, dispatched eight immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Sudan and Mexico to a conflict zone in South Sudan, and illegally deported a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego García, to El Salvador even though an immigration judge’s order forbade it. The Trump administration brought Abrego back to the U.S. last month after the Supreme Court ordered them to facilitate his return, but in recent days government lawyers have said they could deport Abrego to a third country instead.

Advertisement

Skip to end of carousel ICE increasingly targets undocumented migrants with no criminal record is The Trump administrationis increasingly targeting unauthorized immigrants with no criminal record as it ramps up arrests, a Washington Post analysis of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows. End of carousel

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the memo on Saturday, or say how many immigrants are at risk of being deported.

Advertisement Advertisement

Advertisement Advertisement

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, the lead lawyer on a federal lawsuit in Maryland that successfully fought to return Abrego to the U.S., said the deportation procedures in the Lyons memo are “clearly inadequate” to prevent immigrants from being deported to countries where they might be at risk.

“It is definitely thousands upon thousands of people,” he said. “This is a category of people who understood themselves to be out of the woods.”

While in some cases immigrants could be deported to a country that has provided assurances that newcomers will be safe from torture or persecution, Lyons also outlines how officials should proceed if they are deporting people to a country that has not provided those guarantees.

Advertisement

In those cases, officers must follow a more limited procedure than the one Murphy had laid out in federal court in May after ICE attempted to deport immigrants to South Sudan. The judge said officers should screen the men to determine if they have a legitimate fear of removal, give them access to a lawyer and at least 10 days to challenge their removals. The Supreme Court ruling set aside that process, and the men were deported to South Sudan in recent days.

The Lyons memo says ICE can deport someone to a third country that has not offered any safety guarantees within 24 hours of notifying them where they are being sent. Officials will not ask immigrants if they fear being deported to that country, he wrote. Lyons’s memo is based on guidance Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem issued in a March memo, but provides additional details.

Advertisement Advertisement

Immigrants who express a fear of being deported in the 24-hour period will be screened for possible humanitarian protection under federal law and the Convention Against Torture, which Congress ratified in 1994 to bar the government from sending immigrants to a country where they might face torture.

Advertisement

The screenings will “generally” occur within 24 hours to determine if migrants could merit immigration court proceedings, humanitarian protection, or if they should be deported to another alternate country.

However, Lyons wrote that “in exigent circumstances” immigration officers may deport someone as soon as six hours after notifying them of the third country.

Source: Washingtonpost.com | View original article

Felix, Serena go into Team USA HoF along with an icon who paved the way for women: Anita DeFrantz

Anita DeFrantz is inducted into the Team USA Hall of Fame. Kirsty Coventry is the new president of the International Olympic Committee. Coventry traveled to Colorado Springs to watch DeFantz get inducted. DeFrantsz is part of a class that includes Serena Williams, Kerri Walsh Jennings and Gabby Douglas. The IOC will take a more active role in setting guidelines for participation for women in sports, Coventry says. in some ways, the Olympics has been ahead of its time in the effort to bring women into big-time sports, it took until 1981 for the NCAA to sanction women’s basketball. It also shined a global spotlight on some inequities that have existed for decades. The honor comes at yet another tenuous time for women’s sports in the U.S. and around the world. It comes at another time when headline-grabbing debates about gender testing and eligibility in sports will likely bring like leaders like Coventry to the table.

Read full article ▼
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — In some ways, one of the longest-serving members of the International Olympic Committee, Anita DeFrantz, paved the way for the new president of the IOC, Kirsty Coventry, to get to where she is today. That why Coventry, the first female leader of the IOC, pulled a big surprise Saturday. She traveled to Colorado Springs to watch DeFrantz, a trailblazing Olympic rower in 1976 and IOC member since 1986, get inducted into the Team USA Hall of Fame.

“She opened up so many doors, for me and for so many others,” said Coventry, who took over as president last month, in an interview with The Associated Press before the ceremony. “I’m extremely grateful for that. I know that I’ve got to make sure I do that for other women.”

Advertisement Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement Advertisement

The 72-year-old DeFrantz is part of a class that includes eight individual women — among them 11-time Olympic medalist Allyson Felix, four-time Olympic champion Serena Williams, three-time Olympic champion Kerri Walsh Jennings and 2012 all-around gymnastics champion Gabby Douglas.

Also inducted Saturday were Bode Miller, Mike Krzyzewski, Phil Knight, Steve Cash, Susan Hagel, Flo Hyman and Marla Runyan, along with the 2010 four-man bobsled team and the 2004 women’s wheelchair basketball team.

Coventry showed up for DeFrantz, who played an important role in moving votes toward the five-time Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe in the seven-person race to succeed Thomas Bach earlier this year.

Advertisement

This was one of Coventry’s first big — albeit low-key — trips in the new role, and DeFrantz was shocked to see the new president standing there as she got out of her car to head into the ceremony at the Broadmoor.

DeFrantz described herself as a little lonely when she went to her first IOC meeting in 1986.

“I walked in and I thought, ‘This is odd,’” she said. “It was this cavernous room” and she was one of only five female committee members there.

One of her main goals in becoming a shaper of world sports policy: “We had to help people open their minds a little.”

While, in some ways, the Olympics has been ahead of its time in the effort to bring women into big-time sports — 22 women participated in the 1900 Olympics while, for instance, it took until 1981 for the NCAA to sanction women’s basketball — it has also shined a global spotlight on some inequities that have existed for decades.

Advertisement Advertisement

Advertisement

Women’s rowing didn’t debut at the Games until the 1976 Olympics where DeFrantz and her teammates won bronze. Only last year did the Olympics achieve gender parity, with women making up half of the approximately 10,500 athletes, according to the IOC.

DeFrantz, a vice president of the 1984 LA organizing committee, helped spark that progress. She served as chair of the IOC’s women in sport commission for 20 years. She became a member of the IOC executive board in 1992 and was elected as the IOC’s first female vice president in 1997.

A generation later, Felix began her own fight to highlight the way women were treated when they became pregnant. She forced a seismic change in contract terms that, for decades, had given little leeway to female track stars who put careers on hold to have babies.

Advertisement

Felix is now a member of the IOC, as well — following in the footsteps of both DeFrantz and Coventry as Olympic athletes who now have seats at the decision-making table.

“I feel really blessed to come after Anita and I’ve told her this many times, she has paved the way,” Felix said. “She’s a game-changer. Just what she’s seen and contributed to is incredible. For someone like me, it’s just wanting to carry on her legacy.”

Advertisement Advertisement

DeFrantz’s honor comes at yet another tenuous time for women in sports, punctuated by headline-grabbing debates about eligibility and gender testing in track , boxing , swimming and other sports that will likely bring leaders like Coventry and DeFrantz into the mix.

Advertisement

Coventry said it’s important to “protect the female category,” and has signaled that the IOC will take a more active role in setting guidelines for participation.

But for the 41-year-old president, this was a night for celebrating a mentor who made her role in today’s debates possible.

“It’s all about letting people have opportunities,” DeFrantz said. “You can’t make an Olympian. But you can open the door to possibilities.”

Source: Washingtonpost.com | View original article

California farmworker who fell from greenhouse roof during chaotic ICE raid dies

Jaime Alanis, 57, is the first person to die in one of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration operations. He fell from a greenhouse roof during a chaotic ICE raid this week at a California cannabis facility. The United Food Workers said Alanis worked at the farm for 10 years. Four U.S. citizens were arrested during the incident for allegedly “assaulting or resisting officers,” according to DHS.. The company said workers were detained and it is helping provide them with legal representation. The farm also grows tomatoes and cucumbers. The UFW reported Alanis’ death prematurely late Friday, but the Ventura County Medical Center said he was still on life support.

Read full article ▼
SAN FRANCISCO — A farmworker who fell from a greenhouse roof during a chaotic ICE raid this week at a California cannabis facility died Saturday of his injuries. Jaime Alanis, 57, is the first person to die in one of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration operations . Yesenia Duran, Alanis’ niece, confirmed his death to The Associated Press.

Duran has posted on the fundraising site GoFundMe to say her uncle was his family’s only provider and he had been sending his earnings back to a wife and daughter in Mexico. The United Food Workers said Alanis worked at the farm for 10 years.

Advertisement Advertisement

Advertisement Advertisement

“These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families,” the union said recently in a statement on the social platform X.

Advertisement

The UFW reported Alanis’ death prematurely late Friday, but the Ventura County Medical Center later issued a statement authorized by the family saying he was still on life support.

The Department of Homeland Security said it executed criminal search warrants Thursday at Glass House Farms facilities in Camarillo and Carpinteria.

Garcia called family to say he was hiding and possibly was fleeing agents before he fell about 30 feet (9 meters) from the roof and broke his neck, according to information from family, hospital and government sources.

Agents arrested some 200 people suspected of being in the country illegally and identified at least 10 immigrant children on the sites, DHS said in a statement. Alanis was not among them, the agency said.

Advertisement

“This man was not in and has not been in CBP or ICE custody,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a greenhouse and fell 30 feet. CBP immediately called a medivac to the scene to get him care as quickly as possible.”

Advertisement Advertisement

Four U.S. citizens were arrested during the incident for allegedly “assaulting or resisting officers,” according to DHS, and authorities were offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a person suspected of firing a gun at federal agents.

During the raid crowds of people gathered outside the facility in Camarillo to seek information about their relatives and protest immigration enforcement. Authorities clad in military-style helmets and uniforms faced off with the demonstrators, and people ultimately retreated amid acrid green and white billowing smoke.

Advertisement

Glass House, a licensed California cannabis grower, said in a statement that immigration agents had valid warrants. The company said workers were detained and it is helping provide them with legal representation. The farm also grows tomatoes and cucumbers.

“Glass House has never knowingly violated applicable hiring practices and does not and has never employed minors,” it said.

Source: Washingtonpost.com | View original article

Can Trump Deport U.S. Citizens Like Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani?

Donald Trump has expressed openness to deporting U.S. citizens. He has threatened to arrest New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani if he interfered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. Legal experts have said that deporting citizens for any reason is unconstitutional. But the Trump Administration appears to be circumventing that restriction by pushing to strip citizenship from certain people, through a process known as denaturalization. Denaturalization can only apply to naturalized citizens, but that group is estimated to number more than 25 million, or more than 7% of the U.s. population. It has a long and complex history in the United States, but the three main turning points came in 1906, 1940, and 1967. It was originally used to make the citizenship of foreign-born Americans conditional on their behavior, but it’s now a rare practice that reifies the near inviolability of U.N. citizenship, naturalized or otherwise. It became a tool for ridding the American body of ‘undesirables’

Read full article ▼
Donald Trump promised mass deportation, campaigning against undocumented immigrants as a scapegoat for Americans’ economic woes, crime concerns, and more. But since taking office, the President has expressed openness to deporting not just undocumented immigrants but U.S. citizens too. When asked earlier this week whether he’d deport his former advisor, tech billionaire Elon Musk, amid Musk’s criticisms of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump said “we’ll have to take a look.” Musk, who was born in South Africa, became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Advertisement Advertisement

Later the same day, Trump called the citizenship status of New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into question, asserting: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything.” Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, became a U.S. citizen in 2018. Trump also threatened to arrest Mamdani if he interfered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions, to which Mamdani responded in a statement: “The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city.” The Trump Administration has already pursued policies that strip migrants, including international students and humanitarian parolees, of their visas and legal statuses to be in the country, and it has reportedly deported several U.S.-born children along with their foreign-born parents as it seeks to redefine birthright citizenship.

Advertisement

The President has also repeatedly suggested that U.S. citizens who are convicted of violent crimes should be deported to foreign prisons. “We’ll have to find that out legally. I’m just saying if we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I don’t know if we do or not, we’re looking at that right now.” Legal experts have said that deporting U.S. citizens for any reason is unconstitutional, but the Trump Administration appears to be circumventing that restriction by pushing to strip citizenship from certain people, through a process known as denaturalization. While denaturalization can only apply to naturalized citizens, that group is estimated to number more than 25 million, or more than 7% of the U.S. population. Here’s what to know. The history of denaturalization Denaturalization has a long and complex history in the United States. Patrick Weil, a historian and director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and visiting professor of law at Yale University, wrote a book on it in 2012 called The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic.

Advertisement

In it, Weil argues that the institution and evolution of denaturalization “made a quiet yet major contribution to the transformation of contemporary American citizenship.” Through changes in law and Supreme Court rulings, denaturalization went from a process that was broadly used to make the citizenship of foreign-born Americans conditional on their behavior to a rare practice that, because of its high threshold, Weil argues, reifies the near inviolability of U.S. citizenship, naturalized or otherwise. While Weil outlines a number of laws, court cases, and executive-branch actions that shaped denaturalization over the years, the three main turning points came in 1906, 1940, and 1967. When the Naturalization Act of 1906 was passed to try to federalize naturalization processes, it included a provision on denaturalization that Weil writes “was originally and primarily conceived as a means of redressing naturalization fraud and illegality committed prior to or during the naturalization process itself—before the moment an alien obtained American citizenship.” In reality, however, in the following decades, most denaturalizations “occurred out of a desire to expel from the body politic ‘un-American’ citizens: most of them not for fraud or illegality committed before they were naturalized, but because of who they were or what they had done after they obtained American citizenship.”

Advertisement

“Denaturalization became a means for cleansing the American body politic of those naturalized citizens who behaved in ways considered un-American, due to their attachment to a ‘foreign’ morality or to their race, land of origin, or political ideas—sometimes before their naturalization, but, most often, developed afterward,” Weil writes. It became “a tool for ridding the American citizenry of ‘undesirables.’” “If a naturalized citizen was Asian, spoke out against war, was a Socialist, a Communist, or a fascist, or lived abroad, she risked the loss of her American citizenship,” Weil writes, though he noted that: “from 1906 until the end of the 1930s, denaturalizations for political or racial reasons numbered fewer than one hundred. The majority of cases continued to revolve—at a pace of hundreds some years—around foreign-born Americans residing abroad.” During World War II, denaturalization “became an integral part of a proactive program by the Justice Department to bolster national security against threats from America’s ‘enemies.’”

Advertisement

But “foreign-born Americans were not the only ones at risk,” Weil explained. “When denaturalization became a central part of the government’s national security policy during World War II, the 1940 Nationality Act also expanded the number of American-born citizens subject to automatic loss of citizenship.” Before, only American-born citizens who acquired a foreign citizenship could be subject to denationalization, but the 1940 law “extended the denationalization power to include those Americans who had evaded the draft, joined a foreign army, or participated in foreign elections.” That’s when “the Supreme Court intervened and began to reduce the scope of the federal government’s denaturalization authority.” Weil writes: “Before the outbreak of war, the Supreme Court had backed the authority of the executive to pursue the denaturalization of new Americans for failing to adhere to a myriad of legal minutiae, from the form of naturalization applications, to the duration of U.S. residence, to the age of their arrival in the United States.” But over the next three decades, it would take up a number of cases relating to denaturalization and denationalization.

Advertisement

“About half of the Court, depending on the particulars of a given case, continued to uphold the authority of Congress to deprive naturalized and native Americans alike of their citizenship. As the basis for its decisions, the Court asserted judicial restraint and the exclusive authority of the elected branches over foreign affairs. The other half of the Court, however, invoked a number of constitutional rights in support of striking down and restricting laws permitting denaturalization and expatriation. Denaturalization had provoked a fierce debate on the Supreme Court between these two factions,” Weil summarizes. “Although intensely divided, the Court progressively reduced the scope of the federal government’s authority to revoke American citizenship. It did so, in part, by upholding free speech and procedural guarantees for foreign-born Americans.” The most significant ruling came in 1967 when Justice Hugo Black outlined in Afroyim v. Rusk, according to Weil, “an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that secured for all—native-born and naturalized—the full set of privileges entailed in American citizenship. American citizenship was no longer a contingent benefit conferred by a sovereign state in exchange for its citizens’ respect for the laws.”

Advertisement

In the ruling, Black wrote: “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.” Although denaturalization was sharply restricted from that point onward, Weil notes that “a nearly unanimous Court permitted—and still permits, in narrow circumstances—a naturalized citizen to lose her American citizenship.” The limited criteria for denaturalization There were around 22,000 denaturalizations in the U.S. before 1967, according to Weil. By the time his book was published in 2012, he said there had been only 150 since, though the Department of Justice would later tell news outlets that there were 305 cases between 1990 and 2017. “Although its use has been substantially reduced,” Weil wrote, “since 1967 denaturalization is still available on two basic grounds. The first of these grounds applies to individuals who have committed gross violations of human rights.” This primarily focused on naturalized Americans with undisclosed Nazi pasts. “In contrast to judicial skepticism of expatriation in the 1960s and 1970s, courts have not challenged the authority of the government to denaturalize individuals responsible for committing human rights violations,” he adds.

Advertisement

“The second modern ground for denaturalization is for fraud or misrepresentation committed during the naturalization process,” Weil writes. A 2020 advisory by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center explains that “a naturalized U.S. citizen can have that status taken away if the federal government proves by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence in a civil federal court proceeding, or satisfies the beyond a reasonable doubt standard in a comparable criminal case, that the citizen was not qualified for naturalization at the time it was mistakenly granted.” A naturalized citizen can also be denaturalized, the ILRC says, for “refusing under specified circumstances to testify before a congressional committee on alleged subversive activities,” under a Cold War-era law that remains valid, or for failing to meet the requirements if they were naturalized under the wartime-military-service path to citizenship.

Advertisement

While a criminal revocation of naturalization on the basis of naturalization fraud requires, like in all criminal cases, the government to meet a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt burden-of-proof conviction, civil denaturalization proceedings require the government simply to convince a federal court, in which the defendant may not even be provided with an attorney, that a naturalization was “illegally procured” or “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” Illegal procurement, according to the ILRC, refers to someone who was ineligible for naturalization but received it anyway and doesn’t require proof of concealment or misrepresentation, though the organization notes that it is largely a distinction without a difference as “procuring naturalization by concealment or willful misrepresentation is also procuring it illegally.” The eligibility conditions that one can be accused of violating include: a) lawful permanent resident status for five years (or three if married to a U.S. citizen); b) continuous residence in the U.S. for that five- or three-year period; c) physical presence in the U.S. for at least half of that five- or three-year period; d) good moral character; and e) that the person was “ “attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States” during that five- or three-year period.

Advertisement

The last two conditions are the most broad and open to interpretation. “Many of the cases for denaturalization based on lack of good moral character involve individuals who have committed crimes prior to naturalization, but were not arrested or charged until sometime after naturalization, and they did not disclose the existence of these crimes during the naturalization application process,” the ILRC writes. Similarly, if within five years after naturalization, someone “ joins or becomes affiliated with an organization that would have precluded naturalization,” such as a terrorist group, they can be presumed to have been “not attached to the principles of the Constitution” and “not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the U.S. at the time of naturalization,” and thus denaturalized. Denaturalization under Trump Former President Barack Obama ramped up denaturalization efforts with a Department of Homeland Security program called Operation Janus, which mined data, including fingerprint records, to identify people who obtained citizenship through false pretenses.

Advertisement

But the first Operation Janus denaturalization didn’t occur until January 2018, when Trump was in office. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also announced plans around the same time to refer some 1,600 cases to the Justice Department to prosecute, and in its fiscal year 2019 budget, the Department of Homeland Security redirected funds from USCIS to ICE for investigations into naturalized citizens. Trump’s first-term Administration took denaturalization efforts “to new levels,” Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, wrote in 2019. A factsheet by the Open Justice Initiative said the number of denaturalization cases filed annually under Trump nearly doubled that of Obama. In 2020, the Justice Department also established in its immigration office a Denaturalization Section “dedicated to investigating and litigating revocation of naturalization,” ostensibly focusing on “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization.”

Advertisement

“Despite the significant resources this administration is expending on these cases,” the ILRC noted in its 2020 advisory, “in absolute terms the number of people who have had their citizenship stripped remains small so far. However, there are fears that the creation of the DOJ’s Denaturalization Section may result in many more people being denaturalized in the near future. In addition, these efforts will have a chilling effect on the number of legal permanent residents applying for U.S. citizenship and will further burden a system that is already delayed in adjudicating and granting immigration benefits.” In 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to review denaturalization and passport revocation practices, “to ensure that these authorities are not used excessively or inappropriately.” But since taking office again, Trump has made denaturalization a priority again.

Advertisement

A June 11 Justice Department memo published online issued guidance to the Civil Division, the largest litigating body of the department, on its priority initiatives, which included the revocation of citizenships. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who leads the division, said in the guidance that the division “shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.” “The benefits of civil denaturalization,” said Shumate, “include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport.”

Advertisement

Among the cases Shumate ordered prioritizing are cases on those who pose a potential threat to national security, including those with links to terrorism, espionage, or unlawful export from the U.S. of sensitive goods, technology, or information; and those who commit certain kinds of fraud. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers criticized how the directive calls for denaturalization via civil proceedings, which the advocacy lamented carry “a lower burden of proof” and “do not require the government to provide the accused with an attorney.” It also criticized the memo’s “broad scope and vague language.” “The Trump Administration’s push to revoke citizenship is alarming, and raises serious Fourteenth Amendment concerns,” said NACDL President Christopher Wellborn. “The use of civil litigation to evade Sixth Amendment obligations demonstrates contempt for the right to counsel. And although the memo purports to target concealment of earlier offenses, the language suggests that any offense, at any time, may be used to justify denaturalization.”

Advertisement

When it comes to Musk and Mamdani, however, legal experts have said denaturalization proceedings are unlikely. “Denaturalisation is limited to cases where the government can prove material fraud in their original applications,” Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, told Al Jazeera. Trump’s talk of deporting the two, Kagan says, “appears to be irresponsible rhetoric designed to intimidate political opponents.” Musk has previously denied accusations of working in the country illegally before he became a citizen. Mamdani has been accused by members of Congress of sympathizing with terrorists. But while former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was recently appointed to a Homeland Security advisory council, expressed support for calls to denaturalize and deport him—“I think that is [a] very responsible request and something the government should do given the nature of the things that he says,” Giuliani said last week, calling Mamdani a “traitor”—he caveated: “I don’t know that we can come to the conclusion and convict him of it, but he raises a real legitimate concern that he is not a loyal American.”

Advertisement

As Weil noted in his history of denaturalization, the Supreme Court has affirmed that being “a loyal American” is no longer a condition for U.S. citizenship. But as the history of denaturalization has also shown, the Supreme Court can change its mind. And this Supreme Court has already been observed to show “astounding” deference to Trump.

Still, even if the Trump Administration were to denaturalize Mamdani, which would preclude him from taking office, that wouldn’t necessarily mean it could kick him out of the country. Denaturalized citizens do not automatically get deported; rather they are reverted to their last immigration status as a noncitizen—which in Mamdani’s case was a green card holder, or lawful permanent resident.

Source: Time.com | View original article

Source: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMimAFBVV95cUxOME5qS3JWTkhjOGdhQ1BPM3FULVhvT1VPa3haa0d0RDN1TjdIOWJib2NIbUhqU3dWMXFiZlRNZ2tBaFl5d3FtaWhINWZzRnB1UVZuSmFfMnBWdS1rODJ5MllGUTNULVBZc2pMajU5c2lWdGRRblNScmxLNlYtYmxYcFg4MjkxZUlteVJqblZiZ0tINW1seXdrcQ?oc=5

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *