The Fragility of American Citizenship
Establishing U.S. citizenship is supposed to be easy. In 1868, the first sentence of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment declared: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” In light of those words, either a birth certificate or a naturalization certificate is all that is needed to prove U.S. citizenship and to gain all the rights that come along with it—to vote, to hold public office, and to enter and remain in the United States.
The power of those words is diminished today. Through a variety of initiatives, the Trump administration is undermining the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee, and many Americans are learning the hard way.
Naturalized citizens are under the Trump administration, as Baljinder Singh recently discovered. Singh has lived in the United States for nearly three decades, married a U.S. citizen, and became a naturalized citizen more than 10 years ago. Nonetheless, last year the government revoked his citizenship. Why? Because—quite possibly due to an interpreter’s error—and he never received the notice to appear in immigration court under that different name.
