MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos on Sunday pushed back on concerns over President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prioritization of denaturalizing citizens.
The DOJ issued a June 12 memo saying the Trump administration is focusing on stripping citizenship from certain naturalized citizens. Cevallos, on “The Weekend: Primetime,” said it is premature to fret about the memo as it is not the Trump administration that determines whether a citizen is denaturalized. (RELATED: Blue States Try To Keep Illegals’ Medicaid Data Hidden From Trump Admin)
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“I don’t know yet that we should say that all naturalized citizens should fear that they’re both covered by the memo and can be removed under the federal statute, because ultimately it is not the administration that decides,” Cevallos said. “It is a federal district judge. Now, we can get into a whole discussion about how the Trump administration is really good at finding district judges or districts in which they will have more favorable outcomes.”
“But guess what? Other administrations do the same thing. Other litigants do the same thing,” he continued. “Everybody judge shops to some degree. But there is a backstop, and hopefully and presumably it is a federal district judge, or maybe an immigration judge, depending on the procedure.”
However, Cevallos’ comments failed to assuage political commentator and naturalized citizen Leigh McGowan.
“This idea of everybody judge shopping is just crazy to me, because not everybody completely overturns the Constitution over and over and over again. Like, as someone who’s in this position, I don’t think citizenship should be conditional or contingent on something,” McGowan replied. “I don’t think you need to have committed a crime. The last two things on his memo are like, ‘or something that we deem unamerican.’ Right? Like, that could be anything. That could be speaking against the president.”
The memo states that the DOJ, in addition to crimes and national security threats, would also focus on “[a]ny other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
McGowan further argued that the Trump administration could deport naturalized citizens for political views it disagrees with.
“Everybody is now on the chopping block. And that is not how a country can function. And that’s not how immigrants are supposed to live in this country,” she said. “Once you become a citizen — I cried the day I became a citizen. I was so moved by the entire experience. I was in a room full of immigrants. We all had the American Dream. We were there.”
“I’ve been a citizen for 17 years. The idea that that could just be stripped from me because I have used my right of free speech, because I have used my right to protest, because I have spoken up against the current administration is awful,” she added. “And it should make everybody just very unhappy.”
Cevallos pushed back again.
“Let me just say one thing: that just because the administration may not like what you’re saying — at least, I just want to say that technically that would not be grounds,” he said.
However, the legal analyst also acknowledged that the Trump administration could “scrutinize” the applications of naturalized citizens it opposes to determine if they made claims that were “plausibly not accurate.”
Republican Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles asked the DOJ in June to probe whether Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani should be subject to denaturalization hearings for seeming to express support for The Holy Land Foundation, a group convicted of providing “material support” to Hamas in 2008. The congressman noted that Mamdani’s past rap lyrics, “Free the Holy Land Five/My guys,” as evidence.
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