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supreme court
Trump's Denaturalization Rhetoric Violates the Laws and Spirit of America
Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more “American” is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable.
Dec 05, 2025
You might think that when you are a US citizen, you cannot have that status taken away. You would be wrong, it turns out. And behind that fact is a long and often ugly history.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump said that he would “absolutely” denaturalize American citizens if he could. It comes after a wave of harsh rhetoric directed toward immigrants after the tragic shooting of two National Guard members last week.
Yes, the words that the president says have been discounted. But there’s policy behind the rhetorical provocation.
Denaturalization is the process of stripping citizenship from someone who obtained it illegally, such as by not meeting the requirements or by committing fraud or lying during the application process. At first, government interpreted that standard loosely, leading to years of abuse.
As my colleagues Faiza Patel, Margy O’Herron, and Kendall Verhovek explain:
More than 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship between 1907 and 1967 based on political affiliations, race, and gender, according to denaturalization scholar Patrick Weil. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration began denaturalizing German- and Asian-born citizens during World War I, along with anarchists and people who spoke out against the war. During World War II, a push for denaturalization of naturalized citizens from Germany, Italy, and Japan intensified. A primary target included members of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund for disloyalty and insufficient attachment to the principles of the Constitution.
After the war, the Second Red Scare took hold of a country fearful of domestic communism amid its emergence abroad. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
As Weil puts it, a process that was intended to redress fraud and illegality in the naturalization process became used to “expel from the body politic ‘un-American’ citizens.” But even during wartime, the Supreme Court responded, limiting its use.
Throughout the 20th century, the court issued several rulings setting a high bar for denaturalization. In 1943, the court struck down a move to denaturalize Russian-born William Schneiderman over ties to the Communist Party, requiring a “heavy burden” for rescinding citizenship. And in 1946, the court warned against the use of denaturalization as a “ready instrument for political persecutions.” It’s why in recent decades, denaturalization attempts have been appropriately rare... until now.
Over the summer, Trump directed Justice Department lawyers to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings.” At the time, a spokesperson said that “denaturalization proceedings will only be pursued as permitted by law and supported by evidence against individuals who illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process.” Trump’s parameters seem to be much broader. In his Thanksgiving Truth Social post, he said he would “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.”
Among his targets? Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is open to denaturalizing New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). When asked about Elon Musk, he told the press, “We’ll have to take a look.” It appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty; the law isn’t so much a motivation as impulse.
But we shouldn’t mistake impulse for foolishness.
It’s all part of a broader effort to target the rights of immigrants and redefine who is an American. That started on Inauguration Day with the effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, a right that is explicitly in the Constitution. And it’s part of efforts to reverse what top administration officials have called a conspiracy to alter the makeup of the electorate. In an interview, the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, accused previous administrations of admitting immigrants to “make them all citizens and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere in the country.” And on the campaign trail last year, Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared, “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more “American” is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable. More than a century ago, the Supreme Court held that naturalized citizens are on the same footing as those born in the country, and for decades, the Supreme Court has made clear that stripping citizens of their citizenship due to their views or expressions “would run counter to our traditions.”
We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out.
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The Words We Use to Describe Homelessness Will Get People Killed
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. We should see them for who they are: a person suffering and vulnerable, deserving of our empathy.
Dec 01, 2025
Last month, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said of people living with mental illness on our streets: “Involuntary lethal injection… Just kill ’em.” He apologized—after the clip ricocheted across the internet—but the words were said, on air, to millions.
I run a nonprofit that directly serves the homeless. We meet people where they are—under overpasses, on subways, in shelters and supportive housing. I see, daily, how language like “vagrant,” or “zombie” strips people of their personhood. It lowers the public’s guard against cruelty and raises the political ceiling for punitive policies. We cannot afford to pretend that words don’t matter.
“Vagrancy,” once a legal catch‑all used to police and punish poor and Black Americans, is being rehabilitated in public discourse; historians have warned what that signals. And major tabloids routinely label our neighbors “vagrants” in crime headlines, blending poverty status with criminal identity in ways that echo the past.
Even federal policy is now framed around “fighting vagrancy.” That phrase isn’t from a century‑old placard; it’s the heading and premise of a July 2025 executive order, which opens by declaring “endemic vagrancy” a public menace and directs federal agencies to prioritize encampment removals and civil commitment.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators.
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. To them, a person living on the street is barely a person at all but rather an indication of broader disorder that must be swept away or removed. But where should they be removed to? What should happen to them when they get there? Those questions are unimportant to certain portions of the media and political ecosystem.
The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in 2024 cleared the way for cities to punish sleeping outside even when shelter is unavailable. Some jurisdictions have read that as a green light for broader crackdowns rather than investments in housing and health care—turning survival behaviors into ticketable or jailable offenses. The July executive order doubled down, instructing federal agencies to preference grants for jurisdictions that enforce bans on “urban camping and loitering” and to support encampment removals with federal dollars. Words like “vagrancy” aren’t just stigmatizing; they now allocate money and power.
This year we saw what happens when the politics of sweeps outrun basic safety. In January, Cornelius Taylor was killed by a bulldozer during an encampment clearance in Atlanta—first chalked up to overdose, later shown by autopsy to be blunt‑force trauma. And in my home city of New York, Debrina Kawam was fatally set on fire by a stranger while she was sleeping in a subway car. Vocabulary that treats people as nuisances rather than neighbors makes such tragedies more likely.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators. In California’s landmark CASPEH study, 38% of participants experienced violence during their current episode of homelessness, and nearly three quarters reported violence at some point in their lives. Mortality data tell the same story of precarity. In Los Angeles County alone, 2,508 people experiencing homelessness died in 2023—an average of nearly seven people every day. The rate remains multiple times higher than that of the general population.
As a sector, we’ll keep doing our part: street outreach, housing navigation, medical and behavioral health care, and prevention. But leaders in government and media must stop normalizing language that primes the public for harm. Phrases like “person without housing” or “person who is homeless” more accurately reflect that homelessness is a temporary status, not an identity or permanent state of being. And in most cases, we can refer to our neighbors in media stories or political policy without any reference to their housing status.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see. They are sons, daughters, parents, veterans, and caregivers. Some are literally recovering from yesterday’s assault. They are not “vermin.” They are not “zombies.”
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Cautious Celebration as Supreme Court Allows Marriage Equality to Remain Law of the Land
"We cannot take those protections for granted," said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who helped to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide a decade ago.
Nov 11, 2025
In one of vanishingly few US Supreme Court rulings protecting equal rights, the majority-conservative court on Monday rejected efforts to overturn the decade-old precedent of marriage equality.
Without issuing a comment, the court denied an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who was ordered to pay $360,000 in compensation after she refused to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple in defiance of the precedent set by the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
Amid a flurry of rulings that have rolled back sexual and reproductive freedom in other realms—including for the LGBTQ+ community—the court's refusal to hear Davis' appeal was considered a small but still invigorating victory.
“The bar is in hell,” wrote Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on social media. “But this is a win for decency and compassion.”
The ruling came as a relief to advocates for equal rights, who long feared that marriage equality might soon become the next target as the conservative movement grows increasingly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community.
In 2022, as the court's right-wing majority overturned the right to an abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, the archconservative Justice Clarence Thomas signaled in a concurring opinion that it should be the start of efforts to fully revise the court's recognition of "substantive due process," that is, the recognition of rights not explicitly granted by the US Constitution.
He questioned not just the right of same-sex couples to marry, but the court’s entire recognition of the right to privacy established by the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling, which has been the basis for rulings against bans on homosexual relationships and the right to contraception.
Thomas was one of the four conservative justices who dissented from the majority's ruling in Obergefell. Two others—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito—also still serve on the court. The other three conservative justices who have been appointed since, all by President Donald Trump during his first term—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—have remained relatively coy on how they’d rule if marriage equality were to come back up, though they have sided with conservatives in cases that pitted religious liberty against discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people.
In 2023, the six conservatives ruled that a Christian web designer was allowed to decline services to same-sex weddings, overturning a Colorado law that banned discrimination against gay people. Notably, the designer who brought the case had not actually been asked to design a website for any gay couple, but the court's right-wing majority accepted her case regardless.
This apparent zealousness to intervene in favor of discrimination appeared to be a red flag, but as Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman wrote for Bloomberg, Monday's ruling "is best read as a signal that the conservative majority has little interest in revisiting gay marriage," even as "the conservative constitutional revolution at the Supreme Court remains underway."
He notes that just four justices are required for a case to be heard by the court. And while it has aggressively rolled back the rights of transgender people, ended affirmative action, and recognized unprecedented executive authority for President Donald Trump, when it comes to same-sex marriage, "their silence is noteworthy."
Public support for marriage equality has grown considerably in the decade since Obergefell. In July 2015, a month after the court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, 58% of Americans said in a Gallup poll that they agreed that same- sex couples should have the same rights as opposite-sex pairs. That number ballooned to a high of 71% in 2023, and even as attacks on LGBTQ+ people have ratcheted up intensely within the conservative movement, support for marriage equality remains stubbornly steady—68% of Americans still say gay marriages should be valid.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who represented two of the plaintiffs in the 2015 case, said that while she welcomes the court's decision Monday not to erode the hard-won rights of gay people further, advocates should not become complacent.
"I am relieved for today’s decision reaffirming same-sex couples’ continued right to dignity and protection under the law, but we cannot take those protections for granted," Nessel said in a news release. “Members of this Supreme Court have already told us they are willing to overturn Obergefell. It’s only a matter of time before they do.”
Her state of Michigan is one of more than two dozen in which same-sex marriage would become illegal or face restrictions if Obergefell is overturned. She said that Monday's decision "allows us a reprieve, an opportunity to bring our state Constitution into alignment with the protections our residents are entitled to and have enjoyed for more than a decade. Now is the time to act."
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