@Nzall I don't trust them to only use this process in cases of the "biggest criminals"
In the same way they've used the crime of simply crossing the border as an excuse to imprison, separate, and torture immigrants
Plenty of people have been warning about this eventuality
as a culmination of the Trump admin's anti-immigration policy
> Denaturalization is a drastic measure that should only be taken in the most extreme circumstances. But the administration is dramatically expanding denaturalization, using questionable standards and proceedings. As with many other components of its agenda, the Trump administration is discarding longstanding legal norms and protections by adding U.S citizens to its list of targeted individuals, and thereby sending the message that no one is safe in the United States of America.
> These efforts to strip citizenship from Americans are systemic and chilling. They have made U.S. citizens fearful that mistakes made years ago on their past applications could be used to target them, take away their citizenship, and destroy their lives.
Let's be clear: ICE is already using fraudulent/flimsy/manufactured reasons to reject people. Things like someone's name on a form filled out in a way that they consider wrong (which, if people don't have an americanized first/middle/surname, might be impossible to get "correct")
A few (older, but suddenly even more relevant) links:
> The exchange was among several moments of indignation and incredulity during the argument in Maslenjak v. United States, No. 16-309. Several justices seemed taken aback by Mr. Parker's unyielding position that the government may revoke the citizenship of Americans who made even trivial misstatements in their naturalization proceedings.
> ...Chief Justice Roberts added that the government's position would give prosecutors extraordinary power. "If you take the position that not answering about the speeding ticket or the nickname is enough to subject that person to denaturalization," he said, "the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want."
> “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,” L. Francis Cissna, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in an interview with the Associated Press last month. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
> There’s no guarantee this effort will stay confined to cases of cheating and fraud. The Trump administration has shown, in its drive to criminalize asylum-seekers, that the existing processes for seeking legal status can effectively be criminalized at any time. The president’s willingness to demonize all immigrants as intruders on American soil offers little comfort.
> It's important to understand that many immigrants — especially those with naming traditions that don't strictly match U.S. immigration forms — could easily be accused of "fraud" because of cultural nuances that get lost in the complexity and rigidity of the immigration process.
> There is absolutely no reason to believe that the Trump administration will approach "immigration fraud" in good faith, and every reason to believe that it will approach "immigration fraud" with the same aggressive mendacity that it approached "voter fraud."