Chris Feliciano Arnold writes:

Because I was naturalized as a child, I didn’t have to take the famous civics test—I was still learning that stuff in school. I just rolled my fingertips in wet ink and held still for a three-quarter-profile photograph that revealed my nose shape, ear placement, jawline, and forehead contour. My parents sat beside me for an interview with an immigration officer who asked me my name, where I lived, and who took care of me.

But these days, I wonder a lot about that civics test. It consists of 10 questions, selected from a list of 100, on the principles of democracy, our system of government, our rights and responsibilities, and milestones in American history. The test is oral; an official asks questions in deliberately slow, even tones, checking the responses against a list of sanctioned answers. Applicants need to get only six answers correct in order to pass. Democracy is messy, but this test is supposed to be easy.

However, so much has changed in the past few years that I’m not sure how a prospective citizen would answer those questions today. Are the correct answers to the test still true of the United States?

What does the Constitution do? The Constitution protects the basic rights of Americans.

One of the Constitution’s bedrock principles can be traced back to a revision that Thomas Jefferson made to an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, replacing “our fellow subjects” with “our fellow citizens.”

As with constitutional theories of executive power, theories of citizenship are subject to interpretation. Chief Justice Earl Warren distilled the concept as “the right to have rights.” His Court deemed the revocation of citizenship cruel and unusual, tantamount to banishment, “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”

By testing the constitutional rights of citizenship on two fronts—attempting to denaturalize Americans and to strip away birthright citizenship—Trump is claiming the power of a king to banish his subjects. In the United States, citizens choose the president. The president does not choose citizens.

What is the “rule of law”? Nobody is above the law.

Except, perhaps, the president, who is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts performed while in office. Trump is distorting that principle by directing the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE to enforce his own vision of the law without regard for constitutional norms.

Civil law is more malleable than criminal law, with fewer assurances of due process and a lower burden of proof. ICE raids rely on kinetic force to fill detention cells. Denaturalization cases can rely on stealthy legal proceedings. In 2018, the Trump administration stripped a man of his citizenship. He was married to a U.S. citizen and had been naturalized for 12 years. The administration accused him of fraudulently using an alias to apply for his papers after having been ordered to leave the country. In an article for the American Bar Association, two legal scholars argued that this was more likely the result of a bureaucratic mix-up. Whatever the truth of the matter, the summons was served to an old address, and the man lost his citizenship without ever having had the chance to defend himself in a hearing.

The DOJ is signaling an aggressive pursuit of denaturalization that could lead to more cases like these. In the most extreme scenarios, Americans could be banished to a country where they have no connection or even passing familiarity with the language or culture. [Continue reading…]