The draconian interpretation and implementation of immigration laws under the Trump administration have instilled fear in those living in this country without documentation, but now the president is overseeing an initiative to target immigrants who have already become naturalized U.S. citizens to strip them of that status.
While it is not unprecedented to take away citizenship from someone who it was discovered had obtained citizenship through fraudulent means, it has been an extremely rare occurrence.
Now the Department of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced that it is launching a dedicated office to focus on identifying naturalized Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and actively seek to strip them of it.
According to the Associated Press, L. Francis Cissna, the director of the agency, said that “his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.”
“Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.”
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
Until recently, the majority of cases of the government attempting to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship concerned former Nazi war criminals.
Now, with the Trump crackdown on immigrants of all kind, people who previously thought that they were safe and secure in their new homeland because they had gone through the proper channels to obtain a green card and eventually full citizenship will have to worry about getting a sudden knock on the door from immigration agents intent on removing them.
This latest action is just another tactic in the Trump arsenal to convince people from other countries who may want to immigrate to the United States to never even make the attempt.
Trump’s reversal of the long-standing reputation of this country as a place where immigrants can come to find their fortunes through hard work and initiative upends decades of a tradition of relatively open arms to new immigration as a source of renewing American vitality and adding needed skills to the workforce.
His vision of a America with a “No Vacancy” sign hung on its metaphorical doorknob is not shared by the American people 75% of whom, according to the latest Pew research poll, view immigration as a good thing.
Trump’s destruction of the American dream must stop, and the only way is through the polls. Register and vote in the midterms to elect a Congress that will thwart his efforts.
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