How Trumpworld Uses Dramatic Policy Ideas To Terrorize Immigrants And Troll Its Enemies

Last time, it was the wall. Shutting down Muslim immigration. Family separation.

As they anticipate a second term, Donald Trump and his allies’ most audacious anti-immigrant promises include a lineup of new, different hits, albeit in the same key. They promise mass deportations, to strip citizenship from people who attended pro-Gaza rallies, and to remove the legal status that the Biden administration has offered to thousands of non-citizens.

Some of these plans are partly feasible, experts say, while others — like large-scale denaturalizations — could begin in the same place that they would almost certainly founder: lengthy and expensive legal battles.

But they all drive at the same idea that American citizenship is not absolute. Vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) has made a point of labeling the Haitian immigrants legally in Springfield, Ohio as “illegals;” Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration guru, has suggested that a second Trump administration would “turbocharg[e]” efforts to strip citizenship from recently naturalized citizens who attend pro-Gaza rallies. Trump himself has said that he would have immigrants and foreign students who attend “pro-Hamas” protests arrested and deported.

To understand this, and parse what’s real, what’s feasible, and what immigrants and their advocates should be most worried about, I called a few people.

One person on my list was Mike Howell, the executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. Howell is a pugilist; he likes to call himself a “deportation scientist” on X. I asked whether, in his view, people whose grandparents were born in the United States are the same kind of citizen as those who have been naturalized.

“Not if you received your citizenship by virtue of omitting key facts like supporting terrorism. Of course not,” Howell said.

“If somebody has only been a naturalized citizen for a year, they certainly are dissimilar from people who have been citizens for a long time in their familiarity with the United States, its customs, traditions, and history,” he added.

It’s rhetoric that’s become more and more familiar in recent weeks, as Vance stokes racial tensions in Springfield as part of a broader argument about who really belongs in America. As Vance said during his speech at the RNC, America isn’t an idea; greater emphasis, he suggested, should be place on the belief, popular on the European right, that an old, ethnic stock of people form the true citizenry.

“It’s a people with a common history,” Vance said.

A National ‘Review’

Trumpworld has sought to define that prescription with increasingly extreme policy proposals. Take the idea to dramatically expand denaturalizations.

Apart from Stephen Miller, the proposal has come up in Project 2025. At the furthest extreme, provocateurs like shampoo magnate and Claremont Institute writer Charles Haywood have floated the idea of conducting a national “review” of any citizen naturalized after 1965 to determine “capability with America,” among other criteria.

The Trump administration attempted to broaden denaturalizations during its term in office. A second Trump administration would resume that effort, and, if Miller’s and others’ rhetoric is to be believed, expand it by potentially filing denaturalization suits which seek to strip people’s citizenship not based on their having lied to the government during naturalization, but because of an ideological view — “supporting Hamas.” Trump himself has conflated attending pro-Gaza protests with supporting the terrorist organization, saying in May: “Any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students.”

Patrick Weil, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written a book on the history of denaturalization in the U.S., said that it would be impossible for the federal government to strip people of citizenship based on attending a protest alone, though a future Trump administration could try.

The Trump administration’s denaturalization effort grew in part out of a program that began under President Obama, in which DHS reviewed the rolls of recently naturalized citizens to see if any had obtained American passports through fraud or serious omission. The Trump administration then picked up the baton, creating a new DOJ denaturalization section and prioritizing the effort more than any other administration in recent history.

Ideological denaturalizations, like those alluded to by Trump on the campaign trail, largely began with the anarchist writer Emma Goldman in 1909 and became increasingly common during the first Red Scare. They slowed significantly by the middle of the 20th century, when, in a pair of decisions — one in 1943 and another in 1967 — the Supreme Court dramatically narrowed the circumstances under which citizenship could be revoked. Nonetheless, Weil wrote in his book, more than 145,000 U.S. citizens had their citizenship stripped by the courts from 1906 until the 1970s.

Now, Supreme Court precedent limits the government to only stripping people of citizenship via federal court, and if facts have come to light that would initially have caused the application to be rejected. There’s nothing that stops the government from launching a review of a naturalized citizen for reasons outside of that realm (attending a pro-Palestine rally), but under current precedent they would need to find a serious misrepresentation to win in court. Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston marathon bomber, was naturalized less than one year before the bombing he committed; stripping him of citizenship was never seriously considered, Weil pointed out.

Weil, who wrote his book on denaturalization after a previous work titled “How to Be French,” said that Trump allies’ rhetoric works as a threat, regardless of whether it can be realized as policy in the future.

“They’re trying to frighten people,” Weil told TPM.

“The idea of a sovereign citizen that the state cannot touch is almost more popular on the right, including on the right of the Supreme Court among the conservatives, as well as among the liberal side,” Weil told TPM.

Making an Example of Springfield

Another option under discussion would be to focus on an area where the president has undisputed power: who is permitted to reside in the United States before applying for, and receiving, citizenship.

It’s that close but distinct relation to citizenship that explains why conversations about denaturalization quickly morph into discussions about revoking people’s ability to remain in the United States. In Springfield, for example, a portion of the community of Haitian immigrants is there after having received temporary protected status; another portion is there under a humanitarian parole program that the Biden administration implemented in 2023.

Trump has promised to make an example out of Springfield by ending both programs if elected, setting the stage to eject the community there from the country.

Tom Warrick served in the Department of Homeland Security for more than 10 years before departing in 2019. He told TPM that normally, people who lose status have the opportunity to appeal or otherwise challenge that loss.

But a second Trump administration, he said, could move to detain people, leaving them to await deportation until their case is heard — a wait that could take years.

“A lot of people would say, well, I’d rather go home to wherever I came from rather than stay here in immigration detention for that long,” Warrick said.

When I asked Howell about this, he replied, “Hopefully those people have already started thinking through their plans to return and restart their lives in Haiti.”

For a lot of this, the threat towards immigrants — implicit and explicit — is the point.

Many of these proposals would, if implemented by a second Trump administration, likely get bogged down in the courts, or run up against the capacity constraints inherent in the country’s ability to detain and deport undocumented migrants. But for now, during the campaign, discussing them is a way of scaring people and whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment while also making a point: American citizenship is contingent, rooted in a nativist vision that’s largely been out of fashion for the better part of a century.