Kilmar Abrego Garcia is asking a federal judge for a gag order to stop Trump administration officials from publicly attacking him with “inflammatory” statements that attorneys say are threatening his right to a fair trial on criminal smuggling charges.
Lawyers for the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant say Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others, have spent months publicly disparaging his “character and reputation” by smearing him as a wife beater, pedophile, gang member and terrorist.
“The government’s ongoing barrage of prejudicial statements severely threaten — and perhaps have already irrevocably impaired — the ability to try this case at all — in any venue,” lawyers wrote Thursday night.
The Trump administration has “distorted the events and evidence underpinning his case to the public; misrepresented his criminal record; disseminated false, irrelevant, and inflammatory claims; and expressed the opinion that he is guilty of the crimes charged,” lawyers wrote.
Last month, the federal judge overseeing the criminal case ordered his release from jail before trial, finding that prosecutors failed to show “any evidence” that his history or the arguments against him warrant his ongoing detention. Judges have found the allegations “fanciful” and formally ruled that he does not pose a danger to the public.
Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a brutal prison in his home country, igniting a high-profile legal battle for his return at the center of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.
Government lawyers admitted he was removed from the United States due to a procedural error, and several federal judges and a unanimous Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return after his “illegal” arrest.
But the government spent weeks battling court orders for his return while officials launched a barrage of public attacks, declaring that he would never again step foot in the country.
He was then abruptly returned in June to face allegations that he illegally moved other immigrants across the country. He has pleaded not guilty.
In their request to keep him in jail before trial, federal prosecutors claimed he is a member of the transnational gang MS-13 and “personally participated in violent crime, including murder.”
Prosecutors also claimed he “abused” women and trafficked children, firearms and narcotics, and there is also an ongoing investigation into “solicitation of child pornography.”
Abrego Garcia is not facing any charges on any of those allegations, nor has he been convicted of anything. A federal judge determined that the government failed to link those allegations to evidence that implicates him.
Abrego Garcia’s wife had previously sought a protective order against him several years ago, though she never pressed charges and said the couple has since resolved their disputes. She has played a prominent public role defending him.
Last week, a federal judge granted his release from pretrial detention. Immigration authorities arrested him days later and threatened to deport him to Uganda.
A separate judge has blocked the government from deporting him while he challenges his latest arrest. A decision is expected after October 6.
His attorneys have argued that the indictment is aimed at punishing Abrego Garcia for his ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration, which has “vilified” him from the moment the case made headlines that caused massive political headaches for the White House.
After he was released from jail this month, Noem labeled him a “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator.”
That same day, the White House called him “a criminal illegal alien, wife-beater and an MS13 gang member facing serious charges of human smuggling.”
This week, the president called him an “animal” who had “beat the hell out of his wife.”
But the “pièce de résistance,” according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, was a cartoon posted by the White House’s official X account depicting him with “MS-13” written beneath it.
“If the government is allowed to continue in this way, it will taint any conceivable jury pool by exposing the entire country to irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims about Mr. Abrego,” lawyers wrote.
A DHS official told The Independent that if Abrego Garcia does “not want to be mentioned” by administration officials, “then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes.”
“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator,” the official added.
“The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story,” the official said. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The Justice Department declined to comment to The Independent.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has spent the past several months on an involuntary tour of detention centers at home and abroad. Back in March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked up the Maryland dad and took him to immigration detention facilities in Louisiana and then Texas before the U.S. government flew him to the notorious Salvadoran megaprison CECOT—which Trump administration officials have admitted was a mistake.
Months after a federal judge ordered him returned to the U.S., he was brought back in June and immediately taken into criminal custody in Tennessee before he was once again ordered released, at which point he was swiftly put back into ICE custody and shuttled to a facility in Virginia. Over the course of a few months, Abrego Garcia has been in at least three immigration detention facilities, one criminal facility, and a foreign gulag entirely unauthorized to receive U.S. detainees, all while the government has failed at every attempt to establish a clear legal basis for his detention. It is effectively ferrying him from one type of custody to another only when it skirts close to being in open contempt of court.
According to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, he was offered a plea deal for the thin trafficking charge federal prosecutors are pursuing against him with the promise that he would then be deported to Costa Rica; if he refused, federal authorities would instead send him to Uganda, a country he’s never been to. That’s exactly what Trump officials then moved to do before the same federal judge ruled that he could not be deported until at least early October while she considered the legality of their deportation efforts; in the interim, Abrego García is renewing his application for asylum. This is the first time in a decade of covering immigration that I can recall the explicit use of a removal location as a cudgel to gain compliance, especially in a separate criminal matter.
It’s easy to lump this odyssey in with the rest of the Trump-era immigration enforcement spectacle, but I’d argue that it is more of an avatar for the collapse of various systems into an all-encompassing expression of government power. Lawyers, journalists, and researchers have long used the term crimmigration to refer to the interplay between the criminal and civil immigration systems—how a criminal charge can trigger immigration consequences, for example. Still, due process generally demands some independence between the processes; except where explicitly laid out in law, you shouldn’t be able to bundle them together, in the same way that it would be obviously improper to, say, threaten someone with a tax investigation unless they plead guilty to unrelated charges.
Yet since the beginning of Abrego Garcia’s ordeal, the government has been trying to make his case about essentially whatever will stick, flattening the immigration and criminal aspects into one sustained character attack. It attempted to justify his deportation by tarring him as a gang member, an accusation that was based on comically flimsy evidence and which the government never tried to escalate to proving in court. Per internal Department of Justice whistleblower emails, officials desperately cast about for scraps of evidence to paint him as a hardened MS-13 leader and basically struck out.
After a federal judge ordered that he be brought back, the Justice Department devoted significant resources to retroactively drumming up charges over a three-year-old incident that police didn’t act on at the time, in which the government’s main witness, unlike Abergo Garcia, is a convicted felon. It is so flimsy that his lawyers are pursuing the rare defense of vindictive prosecution, pointing out the obvious fact that the criminal charge was ginned up as punishment and PR in itself.
It’s not that the specific contours of the legal cases are immaterial or that we shouldn’t pay attention to the arguments and evidence that the administration is trotting out (or, as the case may be, attempting to manufacture). These things all create precedent and they signal what the administration is willing to do and how judges can or will exercise their power. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the specifics of the immigration and criminal cases are effectively beyond the point, and this is all really about bringing the awesome weight of the government down to bear on a designated enemy.
The administration is attempting to create a situation where Abrego Garcia cannot actually win, even if he does ultimately succeed in his immigration and criminal cases. His life has become untenable despite the fact that the administration has, despite dedicating significant resources to the search, failed to produce any conclusive evidence that he is a public danger or a criminal or really anything but the normal “Maryland man” descriptor that they’ve taken such issue with. This is an effort to demonstrate to everyone the Trump administration might consider an enemy that it has both the will and capacity to destroy their lives by a thousand cuts.
Abrego Garcia is perhaps the most acute example because he sits at the intersection of an array of vulnerabilities: he is a noncitizen without clear-cut legal status, is not wealthy, has had criminal justice contact in the past, and is a Latino man, a demographic that right-wing figures have spent years trying to paint as inherently dangerous. Each of these characteristics provides a certain amount of surface area for the government to hook onto in order to punish him for the offense of making them look bad through the self-admitted error of deporting him illegally.
This is unforgivable for reasons that go beyond ego or malice; as Trump and officials like Stephen Miller move to tighten their authoritarian grip in areas of political opposition, they’re relying partly on might but also partly on a sense of infallibility and inevitability. To put in court documents that they erred in removing this one man to one of the most hellish places on Earth is, in their view, to call the entire legitimacy of their enterprise into question, and that cannot stand.
It is more useful to look at Abrego Garcia’s case as the ultimate extrapolation of this strategy, which is being deployed to various extents against administration opponents like, for example, Federal Reserve board governor Lisa Cook. Trump is attempting to fire her ostensibly over allegations of mortgage fraud, though the administration itself is barely even pretending that this is anything but the easiest and quickest entry point they could find to come after an ideological opponent, or at least a potential obstacle. If Cook had had some hypothetical immigration issue, the administration would almost certainly have latched onto that instead. It’s all a means to an end.
Homan Pledges to Remove Alleged Gang Member with ‘Significant Public Safety Threat’
Border Czar Tom Homan has vowed to deport Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant with a documented criminal past, despite a U.S. District Judge’s recent order to keep him in the country.
Appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Homan called Abrego Garcia a “significant public safety threat,” citing his alleged status as a gang member, a “designated terrorist,” and his past indictment for human trafficking and alien smuggling.
Homan’s statement comes after an Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge, Paula Xinis, temporarily halted the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Abrego Garcia to Uganda. Judge Xinis ordered that he remain in the U.S. until an evidentiary hearing could be held.
During the interview, Homan expressed confidence that Abrego Garcia would be deported, stating, “I’m giving you my word. He will be deported from this country. I got my teeth in this thing. I’m not letting it go.”
The case has been a point of contention between the Trump administration and some Democrats, including Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who has previously advocated for Abrego Garcia.
Documents released by the Department of Justice in April showed evidence of Abrego Garcia’s alleged MS-13 ties dating back to 2019. Despite these allegations and past domestic abuse accusations from his wife, Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. in June to face human smuggling charges.
Homan dismissed the possibility of Abrego Garcia’s asylum claim, arguing that he is “beyond the required one year” and that his case lacks the necessary evidence of persecution to qualify under asylum law.
He maintains that if the judge “rules on the law,” Abrego Garcia” is gone.”
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Kilmar Ábrego García, who was already wrongfully deported once, cannot be deported again until at least early October, according to multiple reports.
CNN reported that the US district judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over the case, scheduled an evidentiary hearing for 6 October, and said that she intends to have Trump administration officials testify about the government’s efforts to re-deport Ábrego.
At the same hearing, Ábrego’s lawyers informed the court that he plans to seek asylum in the United States, according to the Associated Press.
Ábrego’s case has drawn national attention since he was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador in March.
Following widespread pressure, including from the supreme court, the Trump administration returned him to the US in June. Upon his return, however, he immediately faced criminal charges related to human smuggling, allegations that his lawyers have rejected as “preposterous”.
Ábrego, who is 30 years old and a Salvadorian native, was released from criminal custody in Tennessee on Friday while awaiting trial.
But over the weekend, the Trump administration announced new plans to deport him to Uganda.
Then on Monday, Ábrego was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during a scheduled immigration check-in in Baltimore, which was one of the conditions of his release.
He is currently being held in a detention center in Virginia.
Ábrego’s legal team swiftly filed a lawsuit on Monday, challenging both his current detention and his potential deportation to Uganda. In court filings, they argued that the government is retaliating against Ábrego for challenging his deportation to El Salvador.
“The only reason he was taken into detention was to punish him,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney representing Ábrego, on Monday. “To punish him for exercising his constitutional rights.”
Later on Monday, Xinis issued a ruling temporarily barring the government from deporting Ábrego until at least Friday. On Wednesday, she extended her order until Ábrego’s current deportation challenge in court is resolved, according to ABC News.
It added that Xinis said she would issue a ruling within 30 days of the 6 October hearing, and also ordered that Ábrego must remain in custody within a 200-mile (320km) radius of the court in Maryland.
She also reportedly said she would not order Ábrego released from immigration custody, leaving that decision for an immigration judge.
Ábrego entered the US without authorization around 2011 as a teenager. According to court documents, he was fleeing gang violence.
In 2019, a federal court granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador. Despite that ruling, in March, he was mistakenly deported there by the Trump administration.
In court documents in April, the Trump administration admitted that Ábrego’s deportation had been due to an “administrative error”.
Since then, Trump administration officials have repeatedly accused him of being affiliated with the MS-13 gang, a claim Ábrego and his family have denied.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/27/kilmar-abrego-garcia-deportation-trump-asylum
The Trump administration deported seven migrants from third countries to Rwanda in August as part of an agreement, the African nation confirmed on Thursday.
Rwandan government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo said in a statement that the group arrived to the country in mid-August, ABC News reported.
They were “accommodated by an international organization,” Makolo added, and are being visited both by members of the International Organization for Migration and the Rwandan social services.
“Three of the individuals have expressed a desire to return to their home countries, while four wish to stay and build lives in Rwanda,” the spokeswoman added. They are also set to receive workforce training and healthcare. She provided no information of the migrants sent to the country.
Rwanda will take up to 250 migrants following an agreement signed in June.
Four African countries accepted receiving migrants from third countries from the U.S., the other ones being Eswatini, South Sudan and Uganda.
Uganda is the latest one to do so, with CBS News reporting earlier this month that it agreed to the deal as long as deportees don’t have criminal records. It is not clear how many migrants the country is willing to accept.
Overall, at least a dozen countries have already accepted or agreed to accept deportees from third nations so far in the second Trump administration.
Earlier this month the Miami Herald reported that more than three in ten migrants deported to third countries are Venezuelan. The outlet scanned through data obtained by the University of California’s Deportation Data Project. It showed that Venezuelans make up the largest share of deportees sent to countries where they were neither born nor were citizens.
Overall, close to 3,000 Venezuelans were deported to third countries during the first six months of the year, although the outlet clarified that the dataset is likely incomplete. Over two hundreds were infamously sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador, where many claimed to be subjected to numerous abuses before being released as part of a three-part agreement involving the U.S., Venezuela and the Central American country.
Most have been sent to Spanish-speaking countries including Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Spain. However, two were sent to Austria, one to Italy, one to Syria and one to Vanuatu, in the Pacific.
Overall, 7,900 such deportations were recorded by then, with Venezuelans representing 36.71% of the total. They are followed by Guatemalans (20%) and Hondurans (7.8%).
Immediately after Zohran Mamdani became the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City last month, one Republican congressman had a provocative suggestion for the Trump administration: “He needs to be DEPORTED.”
The Uganda-born Mamdani obtained U.S. citizenship in 2018 after moving to the United States with his parents as a child. But Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., argued in his post on X that the Justice Department should consider revoking it over rap lyrics that, he said, suggested support for Hamas.
The Justice Department declined to comment on whether it has replied to Ogles’ letter, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of his claims about Mamdani, “Surely if they are true, it’s something that should be investigated.”
Trump himself has claimed without evidence that Mamdani is an illegal immigrant, and when erstwhile ally Elon Musk was asked about deporting another naturalized citizen, he suggested he would consider it.
The congressman’s proposal dovetails with a priority of the Trump administration to ramp up efforts to strip citizenship from other naturalized Americans. The process, known as denaturalization, has been used by previous administrations to remove terrorists and, decades ago, Nazis and communists.
But the Trump DOJ’s announcement last month that it would “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” has sparked alarm among immigration lawyers and advocates, who fear the Trump administration could use denaturalization to target political opponents.
Although past administrations have periodically pursued denaturalization cases, it is an area ripe for abuse, according to Elizabeth Taufa, a lawyer at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
“It can be very easily weaponized at any point,” she said.
Noor Zafar, an immigration lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said there is a “real risk and a real threat” that the administration will target people based on their political views.
Asked for comment on the weaponization concerns, a Justice Department spokesperson pointed to the federal law that authorizes denaturalizations, 8 U.S.C. 1451.
“We are upholding our duty as expressed in the statute,” the spokesperson said.
Immigrant groups and political opponents of Trump are already outraged at the way the Trump administration has used its enforcement powers to stifle dissent in cases involving legal immigrants who do not have U.S. citizenship.
ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist engaged in campus protests critical of Israel, for more than 100 days before he was released. Turkish student Rümeysa Öztürk was also detained for two months over her pro-Palestinian advocacy.
More broadly, the administration has been accused of violating the due process rights of immigrants it has sought to rapidly deport over the objection of judges and, in cases involving alleged Venezuelan gang members and Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Supreme Court.
Denaturalization cases have traditionally been rare and in past decades focused on ferreting out former Nazis who fled to the United States after World War II under false pretenses.
But the approach gradually changed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Aided by technological advances that made it easier to identify people and track them down, the number of denaturalization cases has gradually increased.
It was the Obama administration that initially seized on the issue, launching what was called Operation Janus, which identified more than 300,000 cases where there were discrepancies involving fingerprint data that could indicate potential fraud.
But the process is slow and requires considerable resources, with the first denaturalization as a result of Operation Janus secured during Trump’s first term in January 2018.
That case involved Baljinder Singh, originally from India, who had been subject to deportation but later became a U.S. citizen after assuming a different identity.
In total, the first Trump administration filed 102 denaturalization cases, with the Biden administration filing 24, according to the Justice Department spokesperson, who said figures for the Obama administration were not available. The new Trump administration has already filed five. So far, the Trump administration has prevailed in one case involving a man originally from the United Kingdom who had previously been convicted of receiving and distributing child pornography. The Justice Department declined to provide information about the other new cases.
Overall, denaturalization cases are brought against just a tiny proportion of the roughly 800,00 people who become naturalized citizens each year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
‘Willful misrepresentation’
The government has two ways to revoke citizenship, either through a rare criminal prosecution for fraud or via a civil claim in federal court.
The administration outlined its priorities for civil enforcement in a June memo issued by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, which listed 10 potential grounds for targeting naturalized citizens.
Examples range from “individuals who pose a risk to national security” or who have engaged in war crimes or torture, to people who have committed Medicaid or Medicare fraud or have otherwise defrauded the government. There is also a broad catch-all provision that refers to “any other cases … that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
The denaturalization law focuses on “concealment of a material fact” or “willful misrepresentation” during the naturalization proceeding.
The ACLU’s Zafar said the memo leaves open the option for the Trump administration to at least try to target people based on their speech or associations.
“Even if they don’t think they really have a plausible chance of succeeding, they can use it as a means to just harass people,” she added.
The Justice Department can bring denaturalization cases over a wide range of conduct related to the questions applicants for U.S. citizenship are asked, including the requirement that they have been of “good moral character” in the preceding five years.
Immigration law includes several examples of what might disqualify someone on moral character grounds, including if they are a “habitual drunkard” or have been convicted of illegal gambling.
The naturalization application form itself asks a series of questions probing good moral character, such as whether the applicant has been involved in violent acts, including terrorism.
The form also queries whether people have advocated in support of groups that support communism, “the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship” or the “unlawful assaulting or killing” of any U.S. official.
Failure to accurately answer any of the questions or the omission of any relevant information can be grounds for citizenship to be revoked.
In 2015, for example, Sammy Chang, a native of South Korea who had recently become a U.S. citizen, had his citizenship revoked in the wake of his conviction in a criminal case of trafficking women to work at a club he owned.
The government said that because Chang had been engaged in the scheme during the time he was applying for naturalization, he had failed to show good moral character.
But in both civil and criminal cases, the government has to reach a high bar to revoke citizenship. Among other things, it has to show that any misstatement or omission in a naturalization application was material to whether citizenship would have been granted.
In civil cases, the government has to show “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt” in order to prevail.
“A simple game of gotcha with naturalization applicants isn’t going to work,” said Jeremy McKinney, a North Carolina-based immigration lawyer. “It’s going to require significant materiality for a judge to strip someone of their United States citizenship.”
Targeting rap lyrics
In his June 26 tweet, Ogles attached a letter he sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking her to consider pursuing Mamdani’s denaturalization, in part, because he “expressed open solidarity with individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.”
Ogles cited rap lyrics that Mamdani wrote years ago in which he expressed support for the “Holy Land Five.”
That appears to be a reference to five men involved in a U.S.-based Muslim charitable group called the Holy Land Foundation who were convicted in 2008 of providing material support to the Palestinian group Hamas. Some activists say the prosecution was a miscarriage of justice fueled by anti-Muslim sentiment following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Ogles’ office and Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Speaking on Newsmax in June, Ogles expanded on his reasons for revoking Mamdani’s citizenship, suggesting the mayoral candidate had “failed to disclose” relevant information when he became a citizen, including his political associations. Ogles has alleged Mamdani is a communist because of his identification as a democratic socialist, although the latter is not a communist group.
The Trump administration, Ogles added, could use a case against Mamdani to “create a template for other individuals who come to this country” who, he claimed, “want to undermine our way of life.” (Even if Mamdani were denaturalized, he would not, contrary to Ogles’ claim, automatically face deportation, as he would most likely revert his previous status as a permanent resident.)
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 29, Mamdani said calls for him to be stripped of his citizenship and deported are “a glimpse into what life is like for many Muslim New Yorkers and many New Yorkers of different faiths who are constantly being told they don’t belong in this city and this country that they love.”
Targeting Mamdani for his rap lyrics would constitute a very unusual denaturalization case, said Taufa, the immigration lawyer.
But, she added, “they can trump up a reason to denaturalize someone if they want to.”
McKinney, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the relatively low number of denaturalization cases that are filed, including those taken up during Trump’s first term, shows how difficult it is for the government to actually strip people of their citizenship.
“But what they can be very successful at is continuing to create a climate of panic and anxiety and fear,” he added. “They’re doing that very well. So, mission accomplished in that regard.”
Last week, Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that called for a federal investigation to determine whether New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Uganda — should be subject to denaturalization proceedings based on eight-year-old rap lyrics that Ogles claims could constitute material support for terrorism. At a news conference Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt indicated that the allegations, “if true, were something that should be investigated.”
And earlier in June, the Justice Department issued a memo announcing its directive to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings.”
The Trump administration made denaturalization a priority during the first term, creating a special Justice Department section to pursue these cases. The administration now appears positioned to expand these efforts with a policy requiring that denaturalization be pursued wherever legally possible.
As the apparent next step in the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime, this rarely used but potentially far-reaching government power is getting newfound attention. As legal scholars who study denaturalization, we believe the new Justice Department policy could significantly expand the circumstances under which naturalized Americans might lose their citizenship in ways that raise serious constitutional questions.
… the [Supreme] court held denaturalization was unconstitutional in most circumstances, leaving open only cases in which someone “illegally procured” citizenship by not meeting requirements or obtaining it through fraud or concealment of material facts. In the half-century after this decision, fewer than 150 Americans were denaturalized, mostly former war criminals who had hidden their pasts.
…
More fundamentally, we argue that aggressive denaturalization policies conflict with constitutional principles of citizenship. The framers envisioned citizens as sovereign, serving as the source of government power rather than its subjects. Allowing the government to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans for decades-old conduct creates exactly the kind of arbitrary governmental authority the Constitution was designed to prevent.
The administration’s “maximal enforcement” approach means pursuing cases beyond clear instances of fraud, potentially including any situation in which evidence might support denaturalization regardless of strength or age. This approach will inevitably result in cases involving ambiguous evidence that can be arbitrarily interpreted by the government.
While supporters of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts argue that denaturalization maintains the integrity of the naturalization system, we contend that the policy risks creating different classes of citizenship, with naturalized Americans facing ongoing vulnerability that native-born citizens never experience. This effectively creates the kind of second-class citizenship that our constitutional system forbids.
The Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is not backing down. In a statement on X (formerly Twitter), Mamdani blasted President Donald Trump for what he described as a direct threat to his rights and citizenship. The comments come amid Trump’s escalating rhetoric on immigration enforcement and his vow to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations if reelected.
“The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp, and deported,” Mamdani wrote in a statement posted online. “Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city.”
