Trump Picks New Immigration Target: Naturalized Citizens and Their Previous Applications

Newly sworn-in American citizens and some dating back decades 

(Their applications under Trump massive review)

This shocking story emerged from the NEW YORKER and the AP.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) had formed a task force to work and identify people who lied on their citizenship applications and to denaturalize them.

Allow me to say bluntly and right up front: WTF is wrong with Trump? Why all this anti-immigrant talk and harsh policy and such? Now he wants to attack those naturalized citizens and their old application packets. 

Sir: Start with your own wife first...!!!

Amid the overwhelming flow of reports of families being separated at the border and children being warehoused, this bit of bureaucratic news went largely unnoticed. But it adds an important piece to our understanding of how American politics and culture are changing.

Like many of the Trump Administration’s sadistic immigration innovations, the new task force doesn’t reflect a change in the law. In fact, like a number of practices, including mass deportations, it builds on the legacy of the Obama Administration, which set in motion the process of re-examining old naturalization files.

(I note: That is misleading re: this article – also the right wanted to compare Obama’s record on suspect visas from Iraqis and Trump’s anti-immigration clamp down policy today – but that issue is NOT even close cite).

L. Francis Cissna, the director of USCIS told the AP that his agency is looking for people who “should not have been naturalized in the first place” — for example, those who had been ordered to be deported earlier and obtained citizenship under a different name — that part sounds reasonable. 

But, it is also one underlying premise that makes this new effort so troublesome – and that is: It is the idea that America is under attack by malevolent immigrants who cause dangerous harm by finding ways to live here.

Michael Bars, the USCIS spokesman, told the Washington Examiner that the agency is hiring dozens of lawyers for the new task force.

The mandate, according to both Cissna and Bars, is to find people who deliberately lied on their citizenship applications, not those who made innocent mistakes. The distinction is fuzzier than one might assume.

Historically, denaturalization has been an exceedingly rare occurrence, for good reason: by the time a person is naturalized, she has lived in this country for a number of years and has passed the hurdles of obtaining entry, legal permanent residency, and, finally, citizenship. The conceit of naturalization is that it makes an immigrant not only equal to natural-born citizens but indistinguishable from them.

So denaturalization, much like the process of stripping a natural-born American of citizenship, has been an extraordinary procedure reserved for very serious cases, mostly those of war criminals.

My 2 Cents: Not sure how many who read this post are naturalized themselves, or have a loved one who is (say wife, or other relative). My wife was naturalized in September 1984 in Hawaii when our son was 5 months old. 

We traveled from Korea to Hawaii while I was working as DOD civilian in Seoul at 8^th Army/U.S. Forces/UN HQ in their training and operations division as their civilian chief for education and training.

She was able to get her citizenship expedited since I was remaining in Korea and thus she was able to cut off years of waiting in line (like 5 years or so). It was and remains a very good path for Americans who marry overseas and stay in government jobs for the country and save a lot of red tape as it were. I’m pretty sure her paper work was and remains in good proper order without any errors, mistakes, and certainly no “lies.” 

I will say as clearly as possible to Trump and the USCIS with this mandate, “Come for my wife and you’ll have war on your hands.” My son is now 34 and my daughter is soon to be 32. They are both natural born Americans born in the U.S. Army hospital in Seoul and were properly registered as U.S. citizens broad via the US Embassy in Seoul. 

I am natural born citizen, born in Illinois. I served 30 years in the Marine Corps and DOD for a total of 44 years of government service including two infantry combat tours in Vietnam with three war wounds during those two tours. 

So, come for us, and expect WW III – that is not a threat, just a promise. I want to make that perfectly clear. 

In closing, may I suggest that if Trump wants to examine naturalized citizens who may have lied on their applications that he start with Melania Knauss-Trump and her parents. 

FYI – from Vanity Fair: The Slovenia-born Melania Trump has been a U.S. citizen since 2006, but some, like The Washington Post, are questioning how she was able to secure her EB-1 visa in the first place. In 2000, Trump (then-Knauss) was dating Donald Trump and applying for the so-called “Einstein visa,” usually reserved for those with “extraordinary ability.” 

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, criteria for the EB-1 includes professors, researchers, multi-national managers and executives, and those with “extraordinary ability,” which requires applicants to provide evidence of a one-time achievement such as a Pulitzer Prize or Olympic medal, or show that they have met 3 of the 10 listed criteria including “published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media” and “performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations.” She was a model before marrying Trump.

Related to Melania Trump – her parents now permanently in the U.S. – cite: Some like her parents even speculate that her parents could have benefited from an immigration program that Trump wants Congress to cut – that is the “so-called Chain Migration.”

Just like the First Lady's parents, Amalija and Viktor Knavs – now permanently here  because of that exact same “Chain Migration” policy Trump rants about wanting to kill or cancel or get rid of.

Some have accused Melania Trump of illegally overstaying her visa just to marry Trump and thus to gain citizenship but her lawyer says she sponsored herself for a “green card” before marrying him in 2005.  

An AP investigation discovered she violated terms of her tourist visa by working when she first arrived before getting it changed to a work visa.

So, want to review past applications for admission and citizenship, Mr. Trump? Then start in your own backyard. Tic toc, tic toc...

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