Aggressive Move to Deprive Naturalized Citizenship for Immigrants—Part of Trump/Pence Fascist Program of Ethnic Cleansing

July 16, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a West Coast reader:

One of the little-known but highly ominous prongs of the anti-immigrant battering ram of the Trump/Pence regime now underway is its intensified moves to take legal status away from immigrants who have acquired naturalized U.S. citizenship and make them deportable. Aggressive denaturalization is now part and parcel of the comprehensive fascist program of xenophobic ethnic cleansing, along with ending DACA; instituting the Muslim ban; zero tolerance for border crossings; family separation replete with baby jails; refusing asylum seekers and refugees; and targeting non-white nationalities in general—to make America white again.

A new office is being created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It was announced in June that this office will house a brand-new task force with the specific goal of going after what they consider “bad” naturalization cases. USCIS says that it is hiring dozens of lawyers and immigration cops to comb through cases.

This marks the first time the government will have an entire office dedicated to identifying individuals and stripping them of their citizenship. In January 2017, just as the Trump/Pence regime was being inaugurated, the USCIS set up a pop-up office in Los Angeles as its national headquarters to search out supposed “fraudulent fingerprints.” Since then, at least 2,536 cases have been flagged for additional review.

USCIS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can denaturalize someone through a criminal or civil bureaucratic process. Civil cases are based on a lower standard in which the government is not required to provide a lawyer, nor is there a right to a jury trial. The government has been pursuing more of these cases of late. Among civil codes, for someone to be eligible for denaturalization, are ones vaguely labeled “crimes of moral character.”

USCIS could act against anybody they deem to have provided false information or alleged to have committed a later-discovered crime before they were naturalized. “Moral character” has extreme importance for naturalized citizens subjected to this administrative process. Drug crimes involving more than 30 grams of cannabis and “damaging a marriage through an extramarital affair” are also considered important factors on whether someone can be denaturalized through nullifying previously accepted “moral character.”

The inclusion of “an extramarital affair” means criminalizing a violation of the Christian code (as “sin”) since marital infidelity is not (yet) a crime in the general society. This is very much in line with the views of the great many Christian fascists surrounding Trump, such as Pence and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch and their minions, whose actual goal is establishing a theocracy.

In June 2017, the Supreme Court, in the case of Maslenjak v. United States, ruled that “the Government must establish that the defendant’s illegal act played a role in her acquisition of citizenship.” The Trump/Pence regime’s position was that even minor “lies” can lead to loss of citizenship, based on their fascist agenda and definition of what is true or false. As one immigration lawyer in San Diego, California, said: “What the government wanted was for any lie or misrepresentation to be enough to denaturalize you.... If they could prove you lied about anything, that could be enough.”

The Department of (IN)Justice now under rabid pig Jeff Sessions won its first denaturalization case against a native of India, Davinder Singh, in January 2018. His immigration status was reverted from naturalized citizen to lawful permanent resident, making him subject to deportation at the whim of DHS and ICE. The case was part of a new government initiative called Operation Janus. This initiative will target 315,000 people supposedly based on missing fingerprint data from centralized digital fingerprint files. It seems that because USCIS failed to use fingerprint records effectively, those who have been granted citizenship without proper fingerprint records, that is, before fingerprints were digitized, may now be subject to having their citizenship revoked.

Operation Janus is a large-scale campaign to denaturalize people. While conceived and launched in 2016 under Obama, it has been qualitatively ramped up under the Trump/Pence fascist program to truly unprecedented draconian heights. The executive director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center points to the alarming implications of the regime’s denaturalization initiative: “To go after people who have been citizens for years—and for what seems like very insignificant reasons—is a McCarthy-like witch hunt ... prioritizing xenophobia... I find this very distressing.”

ICE manuals also say that citizenship can be revoked “within 5 years after naturalization, becoming a member of or affiliated with an organization in which membership or affiliation at the time would have precluded naturalization,” or “refusing, within 10 years after naturalization, to testify as a witness before a congressional committee concerning subversive activities.”

It is possible that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, could be stripped of their citizenship through Operation Janus in the not too distant future. There had been a systematic campaign for decades to distance the supposedly “good immigrants” (who went through the whole process of having or getting papers/legalization) from “bad immigrants” (who are undocumented and deemed “illegals,” deserving all kinds of abuse and assault). Yet the new push to denaturalize citizens makes clear that laws will be made or broken by the imperialists themselves to suit their global and domestic interests at any given time. And what or who was legal yesterday may be illegal tomorrow, and quite literally.