Following the first 100 days of President Trump's second term, I made the case that the meaning of citizenship had changed. I wrote, "They are trying to make it a commodity which one can lose at a moment's notice like a 401(k)."
Mind you, I wrote this in the context of American born citizens receiving letters from DHS demanding they leave the country. But it equally applies to landed immigrants who have played by the rules only to be told they won't attain American citizenship. They are being informed only moments before they were to be naturalized as American citizens as was the case at Faneuil Hall in Boston last week:
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
The 19 countries in question are Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Yemen,
Last I checked, national origin is a prohibited ground of discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Not that the Trump Administration cares about the Civil Rights Act much less civil rights. President Trump has made his feelings about Somalis known characterizing them as "garbage" while threatening land strikes against Venezuela amid randomly firing on alleged drug boats off its coast. During the 2024 election campaign, Trump repeated the false claim the Haitian migrants were eating cats and dogs.
The idea that a Republican President would oppose immigration from Cuba would have been inconceivable 15 years ago, but not so now. As for Chad, I'm convinced that Trump grew up disliking someone named Chad. This policy is arbitrary and capricious.
Of course, the attack a fortnight ago in Washington, D.C. by an Afghan national which claimed the life of a member of the West Virginia National Guard while wounding another member is the casus belli of this arbitrary and discriminatory policy. It amounts to little more than collective punishment.
Aside from the discrimination on the basis of national origin, this policy also represents a violation of individual rights. If the Trump Administration has evidence that any of the people who were deprived of the citizenship they legally attained, then let them show cause.
Naturally, they have no such evidence. The Trump Administration simply wishes to exclude people from certain countries from ever attaining American citizenship. In time, they will no doubt attempt to render these people as enemy aliens with the objective of deportation.
In summary, the actions of the Trump Administration at Faneuil Hall and elsewhere around the country are fundamentally un-American.
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