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citizenship
Trump Is Testing the Limits of Our Democracy—Will We Hold Firm?
The way we all react to these tests—from the disappearing of U.S. citizens to the threatening of judges—will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Jul 15, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship is a “test.”
Kids do it all the time. Throw a tantrum in the store demanding cookies and if the parents don’t remove them from the store right away, every visit will see the tantrums escalate. Testing the boundaries. When the test succeeds, the boundaries get moved and a new boundary gets tested, on and on until finally the child’s behavior is so egregious he’s stopped. Or he always gets away with everything and grows up to be Donald Trump.
We learn this early.
We’ve seen a series of these tests coming from the Trump administration, following the very specific and consistently repeated pattern that history tells us played out in the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, el Sisi, and pretty much every other person who took over a democracy and then, step-by-step turned it into a dictatorship.
Trump started testing racism as a political weapon when he came down the elevator at Trump Tower and spoke about “Mexican murderers and rapists” in front of what media reports said was a crowd he’d hired for $50 per person from a company that provides extras to movie and TV production companies.
While his initial goal was reportedly to get NBC to renew “Apprentice” and pay him more than Gwen Stefani, his racism test work out shockingly well; suddenly he was a serious contender for the party that had inherited the KKK vote when Democrats abandoned the South with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the 1960s.
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Another test was whether the exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies that he and his family had used to hustle real estate could work in politics.
He quickly discovered that GOP base voters—after decades of having uncritically (slavishly, even) swallowed lies about trickle-down economics, “evil union bosses,” and the “importance of small government”—were more than happy to embrace or ignore, as the occasion demanded, his prevarications.
From there, Trump tested exactly how gullible his most fervent supporters—and the media that fed them a daily diet of very profitable outrage and hate—would buy into a lie so audacious, so in defiance of both the law and common sense, so outside the bounds of normal patriotism, that they could be whipped into a murderous frenzy and kill three police officers while trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
The nation and our press reacted as if he’d failed that test, but when he was able to cow enough senators to avoid being convicted in his impeachment trial, he knew he’d won.
Now he’s again testing how far he can go.
George Retes is a 25-year-old Hispanic natural-born American citizen and disabled Army veteran working as a security guard at a legal marijuana operation in California. When it was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he got in his car and tried to drive away to avoid getting in the middle of what he saw as trouble.
Masked agents chased him down, smashed the window of his car and pepper-sprayed him in the face, dragged him out of his car, and disappeared him.
Testing.
Will Democrats make a stink? Will the media make it more than a one-day story? Will any Republicans break rank and stand against his excesses? Was it even mentioned on any of the Sunday shows? How far can he go next time?
So far, Trump thinks he’s winning these tests. The outrages are coming so fast and furious that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of them, just like in Germany in 1933 and Chile in 1973.
Retes wasn’t the only U.S. citizen who’s been arrested or detained by ICE; they’ve gone after a mayor, a member of Congress, and even assaulted a United States senator.
A 71-year-old grandmother was assaulted and handcuffed by masked agents. Axios documents others; as the CNN headline on the story about other U.S. citizens being snatched notes: “‘We Are Not Safe in America Today:’ These American Citizens Say They Were Detained by ICE.”
Testing.
After years of hysteria on the billionaire-owned sewer of Fox “News” about our nation’s first Black president deploying “FEMA Camps” to detain white conservatives, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others in Las Vegas, ranting that Federal Emergency Management Agency Camps set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and... confiscating guns.”
He murdered those innocent concertgoers, he said, to “wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” saying, “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
Now those detention facilities conservatives feared has come into being, as Republicans in Congress just funded concentration camps like “Alligator Auschwitz” in multiple states across America.
Visiting congress members claim inmates are packed over 30 to a cage, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) reporting her horror when she was shown that “they get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth, where they poop, in the same unit.”
Testing.
We recently learned via CBS News from a whistleblower and now-released texts that Trump’s former lawyer and now-nominee for a lifetime federal judgeship, Emil Bove, then working in the Justice Department, advised the administration officials to tell federal courts “fuck you” when they ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran hellhole concentration camp.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
For months, the administration appears to have followed his obviously unconstitutional and illegal advice. Republicans want him on the federal bench anyway.
Testing.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who Trump official Erez Reuveni said had been deported “in error”—described how he was treated in that El Salvadoran concentration camp, telling his attorneys and the court that he’d been repeatedly beaten, then forced to kneel from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am “with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion.”
He had committed no crime and was deported in open violation of a federal judge who demanded the plane either not take off or return before landing in El Salvador. The Trump administration simply and contemptibly ignored the court’s order.
Testing.
In a White House visit, Trump told the El Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele (who refers to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator”), that he wants to send American citizens to that country’s torture centers.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump said as the two men laughed. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”
Testing.
Meanwhile, ICE detention facilities are also holding U.S. citizens like Andrea Velez, 32, who was snatched by masked agents during a raid in Los Angeles. As LA’s ABC News affiliate Channel 7 reported:
Velez, a marketing designer and Cal Poly Pomona graduate, was arrested Tuesday morning after her family dropped her off at work. According to her attorneys, Velez's sister and mother saw her being approached and grabbed by masked men with guns, so they called the Los Angeles Police Department to report a kidnapping.
Police responded to the scene near Ninth and Spring streets and realized the kidnapping call was actually a federal immigration-enforcement operation.
She’s out of the detention facility now, but on $5000 bond; ICE apparently has plans for her future.
Testing.
And now Trump is telling us he wants to strip a natural-born U.S. citizen comedienne—who’s made jokes about him that pissed him off—of her U.S. citizenship, “Because,” he says, “of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Hitler gained the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933; by July of that same year, a mere six months later, he’d revoked the citizenship of thousands for the crimes of being “socialists,” “communists,” Jews, or journalists and commentators who’d written or spoken ill of him. Trump appears to be just a bit behind him on that timeline.
Testing.
Trump wants NPR and PBS defunded as soon as possible, having issued an Executive Order to that effect, and has ordered his Federal Communications Commission to launch investigations that could strip major TV networks of their broadcast licenses if they continue to report on him and his activities in ways that offend him. He shut down the Voice Of America, ending America’s promotion of democracy across the world. He kicked The Associated Press out of the White House press pool.
Testing.
Trump has declared large strips of land along the southern border to be federalized territory and put the American military in charge of policing the area, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prohibits the military from performing any sort of police function against civilians.
Testing.
When students spoke out on campus against Trump ally and longtime Kushner family friend Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s murderous assault of Gaza and support for settlers stealing West Bank land from Palestinians, armed and masked federal agents began arresting those students, imprisoning them for their First Amendment-protected speech.
Then Trump went after their universities, bringing several to heel just as Orbán has in Hungary and Putin has in Russia.
Testing.
Yesterday, six Republicans on the Supreme Court said that Trump could wholesale mass- fire employees of the Department of Education, essentially shutting down an agency created and funded by Congress in defiance of the constitutional requirement that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent, flaming in extreme alarm at her colleagues:
This decision] hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out... The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.
Or maybe the six Republican justices on the court are just scared? After all, judges across the country are being threatened, having pizzas delivered to their homes in the middle of the night by way of saying, “We know where you live.” This after U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl, was fatally shot at their New Jersey home by a gunman disguised as a pizza delivery driver. Her husband was also shot, but survived.
A few months ago, after one of Trump’s rants against judges who rule against him, Judge Salas told the press:
Hundreds of pizzas have been delivered to judges all over this country in the last few months. And in the last few weeks—judges’ children. And now Daniel’s name was being weaponized to bring fear to judges and their children. You’re saying to those judges—“You want to end up like Judge Salas? You want to end up like Judge Salas’ son?”
Testing.
What’s next? Will we see Americans who’ve spoken poorly of Trump on social media arrested like both Orbán and Putin do?
Will more students end up on the ground or in jail?
Will more judges be charged with the crime of running their own courtrooms in ways Trump and ICE dislike?
More mayors arrested?
More Democratic Senators taken to the ground and handcuffed?
Will Americans start being disappeared in numbers that can’t be ignored? Deported to El Salvador and South Sudan?
Will journalists be destroyed by massive libel suits or imprisoned for what they write?
Will more judges bend to Trump’s will because they’re either terrified or, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, have apparently become radicalized by Fox “News” or other right-wing propaganda outlets?
The way we all react to these tests will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Former President Barack Obama says Democrats need to “toughen up.” While true, it would have been nice to hear “tough” words of outrage, warning, and leadership from him and former Vice President Kamala Harris over the past six months. And former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
See you on July 17—this Thursday—for some “good trouble.”
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'All Are Now Vulnerable': Legal Scholars Alarmed as DOJ Begins Push to Denaturalize Citizens
"Anyone could be prioritized," a spokesperson for the ACLU told Common Dreams. "It's really chilling."
Jul 01, 2025
As the Trump administration has begun the push to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans, legal scholars and advocates are calling it a dangerous step toward using citizenship as a political weapon.
On June 11, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an internal memo written by Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate calling on DOJ attorneys to pursue "civil denaturalization" of foreign-born U.S. citizens.
"The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence," the memo said, adding that it should be among the division's top five priorities.
It suggested a wide variety of citizens who could be targeted for denaturalization. This includes perpetrators of violent offenses like "torture, war crimes, or other human rights violations." But it also targets much broader groups of people such as those "who pose a potential danger to national security" or those who "acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations."
It also calls for "any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue."
Naureen Shah, director of government affairs for the ACLU's Equality Division, told Common Dreams that "it's another devastating attack by the Trump administration on people who they want to cast as not belonging here."
The memo's vague language has Shah and other legal scholars warning that denaturalization could become a tool to deport political opponents, an effort that would be harder for courts to stop following Friday's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which hamstrung the ability of lower courts to stop illegal actions by the Trump administration using injunctions.
Joyce Vance, a former United States Attorney, who is now a law professor and a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC, warned Tuesday about the possible implications on her blog Civil Discourse:
"It could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers?" Vance wrote. "All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone."
"Anyone could be prioritized," Shah said. "It's really chilling."
Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western University, told NPR that it was "especially concerning" that the administration would plan to pursue denaturalization through civil court.
"Civil denaturalization cases provide no right to an attorney, meaning defendants without resources often face the government without representation," she wrote in a 2019 study on the history of denaturalization along with her colleague Irina Manta. "There are no jury trials, with judges making citizenship determinations alone. The burden of proof is 'clear and convincing evidence' rather than the criminal standard of 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' Additionally, there is no statute of limitations, allowing the government to build cases on decades-old evidence that may be incomplete or unreliable."
Robertson said Trump's approach mirrors that undertaken during the McCarthy era, when those deemed "un-American" were stripped of citizenship due to their political views.
"At the height of denaturalization, there were about 22,000 cases a year of denaturalization filed, and this was on a smaller population. It was huge," she said.
The Supreme Court stepped in to reel back denaturalization in 1967, determining that, in Robertson's words, it was "inconsistent with the American form of democracy, because it creates two levels of citizenship." After that, the number of denaturalization cases plummeted to the single digits each year. The Trump administration seems to be hoping to reverse that trend.
Republican politicians have not been shy about calling for their political opponents to be stripped of citizenship. Last week, following Zohran Mamdani's shocking victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) called for the Ugandan-born state assemblyman to be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and "deported," referring to him as an "antisemitic, socialist, communist."
Ogles accused Mamdani of failing to disclose his political "affiliations or sympathies" during the process that led him to become a citizen in 2018. He singled out Mamdani's support for the Holy Land Foundation, whose leaders were convicted in a widely criticized "terrorism financing" case in 2008. Notably, the leaders of the group were never accused of directly funding terrorist groups or terrorist acts.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Ogles' call to deport Mamdani, and she did not shoot down the idea.
"I have not seen those claims, but surely if they are true, it's something that should be investigated," Leavitt said.
It was not the first time Republicans have called to deport leaders in the other party explicitly for their political views.
In June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier called for the Trump administration to "deport and denaturalize" Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia, after she criticized President Donald Trump's deployment of the military to quash protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles.
The Trump administration has already targeted lawful immigrants with deportation purely for their political views. In March, the administration abducted and attempted to deport pro-Palestine student activist Mahmoud Khalil, explicitly because he was a "threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States," similar language to what the DOJ now says is justification for denaturalization. The administration has also attempted to deport others, like Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, for as little as co-writing an op-ed calling on her university to divest from Israel.
"The way the memo is written, there is no guarantee DOJ will pursue cases against violent criminals," Vance said. "They could just do easy cases to ratchet up numbers, like we're seeing with deportation. Or they could target people who, they view as troublemakers."
There are more than 25 million people in the United States who are naturalized citizens.
"They should not have to live in fear that they'll lose their rights," Shah said.
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The GOP Is Already Planning to Win the Midterms... by Suppressing Your Vote!
The party is taking no chances on the upcoming plebiscite and has hatched a plan to rig all future federal elections with the goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
May 10, 2025
If you’re counting on the 2026 midterm elections to wrest control of U.S. Congress from the GOP, be forewarned.
The party is taking no chances on the upcoming plebiscite and has hatched a plan to rig all future federal elections with the goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
At the center of the plan is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, passed on April 10 by the House and pending before the Senate, and an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on March 25 with the Orwellian title of “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” And looming in the background, with the final word on either measure’s constitutionality, is the Supreme Court, packed with three Trump appointees and holding a long and sorry record of hostility to voting rights.
All of this is happening step by step, setting the stage for what could turn out to be the final chapter for American democracy.
The SAVE Act would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or some other documentary proof of citizenship in person every time they register or re-register to vote; require each state to take affirmative steps on an ongoing basis to ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote; and remove noncitizens from their official voter lists. It would also create a private right of action, after the fashion of the Texas anti-abortion law, to allow disgruntled individuals to sue election officials who register voters without obtaining proof of citizenship and establish criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for election officials who violate the act.
Trump’s executive order is no less extreme. Among its directives is a mandate for the Election Assistance Commission, an independent nonpartisan agency created by Congress, to require voters to submit documentary proof of their citizenship when using national voter registration forms. It would also stop states from counting mailed-in ballots votes that are sent in by Election Day but are delivered afterward, require recertification of all state voting systems to meet new security standards set by the EAC, and halt election assistance funding to states that do not comply with the terms of the order within 180 days. Perhaps most alarming, the order would allow the Department of Government Efficiency and the Department of Homeland Security to subpoena state records and use federal databases to review state voter registration lists.
There is some good news amid the darkness. On April 24, federal district court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who sits in Washington, D.C., issued a 120-page opinion and preliminary injunction, blocking the EAC from adding documentary proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states—not the president—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, holding that Trump’s order violated the separation of powers and referring to Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states:
The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [original text] Senators.
But while voting-rights groups have praised Kollar-Kotelly’s opinion, the judge left the rest of the executive order in place. More concerning, the ruling did nothing to derail the SAVE Act. As the judge noted, “Consistent with [the separation of powers doctrine], Congress is currently debating legislation that would effect many of the changes the president purports to order.”
The dangers posed by the SAVE Act cannot be understated. According to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center and affiliated organizations, more than 9% of American voting-age citizens, or 21.3 million people, don’t have a passport, birth certificate, naturalization papers, or other proof of citizenship readily available. “Voters of color, voters who change their names (most notably, married women), and younger voters would be most significantly affected,” the Brennan Center has warned.
In an article posted after the House approved the act, Democracy Docket, the digital election news platform founded by attorney Marc Elias, featured the views of a group of distinguished historians and voting experts on the act.
“There’s never been an attack on voting rights out of Congress like this,” Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Docket. “It’s always been the federal government trying to keep states in check on voting rights, for the most part.”
“Congress has never passed a voter-suppression law like this before,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s voting-rights program, said. “When it has exercised its power to regulate federal elections, Congress has usually done so to protect the freedom to vote. If this becomes law, it will be a new low for Congress.”
Princeton professor Sean Wilentz also weighed in with a dire assessment. “It’s the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history,” Wilentz said, characterizing the act as “the latest attempt to gut voting-rights advances that were made in the 1960s,” one more dangerous than the Jim Crow-era laws used in the South, because it is national in scope. “This is an attempt to destroy American democracy as we know it.”
All eyes now turn to the Senate, where Democrats have the power to filibuster the SAVE Act to prevent its passage unless 60 members vote to invoke cloture. Thus far, the Democrats seem to be holding the line, even in the face of persistent propaganda spewed by Trump, Elon Musk, and other Republicans that election fraud is rampant and that Democrats are “importing [undocumented] voters” to swing elections. In truth, of course, election fraud in the U.S. is miniscule, with some long-range state-by-state studies finding it occurs at rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025% of total votes cast.
Should any part of the SAVE Act pass and be signed into law, it will likely come before the Supreme Court, where its fate may turn on Chief Justice John Roberts, who along with Amy Coney Barrett, sometimes aligns with the panel’s liberals in big cases.
Roberts, however, has a long history of undermining voting rights that stretches back to his stint as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration and his role as a behind-the-scenes GOP consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
In 2013, as chief justice, he composed the disastrous majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. In 2019, he continued his anti-voting-rights crusade, writing the majority opinion Rucho v. Common Cause, which removed the issue of political gerrymandering (the practice of designing voting maps to benefit the party in power) from the jurisdiction of federal courts. And in 2021, he joined a 5-to-4 majority ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito that upheld Arizona laws prohibiting out-of-precinct voting and criminalizing the collection of mail-in ballots by third parties.
In the meantime, hundreds of lawyers have resigned from the Justice Department, repelled by Trump’s reactionary policies. As The New York Times has reported, the exodus has been especially felt hard at the department’s civil rights division, whose mission Trump has transformed from one of opposing voter suppression to stamping out phony claims of rampant election fraud.
All of this is happening step by step, setting the stage for what could turn out to be the final chapter for American democracy. Not only is it not too early to start thinking about the midterms, it may already be too late.
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