There is a need to codify a consistent, stringent burden of proof, placing the onus on the government to prove non-citizenship prior to revocation or denial of passports, and in related cases that raise the predicate question of whether an individual is a U.S. citizen. As matters stand, the Department of State, on a discretionary basis, is empowered to require unlimited additional proof, including requiring unsuspecting citizens to obtain obscure records, sometimes more than 50 years old. There is no cut-off point limiting the power of the U.S. government in raising retroactive suspicion that an individual is not, and never was, a citizen. Individuals thrust into this situation have lived their entire lives as Americans. U.S. officials, both in Yemen and at the southern border of the U.S., have sought to deny or take away passports from U.S. citizens. Their tactics—including harsh interrogations, detention, and threats to family members—have resulted in false testimony concerning citizenship, as documented through cases examined in this report. Nevertheless, it appears that the vast majority of individuals who take the government to court to prove they are U.S. citizens prevail and receive a passport. Government efforts to deny or revoke passports from U.S. citizens, like the denaturalization programs described above, are wasteful and disruptive—an elaborate search for needles in a haystack. Political attacks on citizenship by birth The chief recommendation of this report is to rein in practices that threaten the security of citizenship. Contemporary attacks on citizenship disproportionately affect certain Americans on the basis of their national origin, religion, and race. These attacks, like the efforts to redefine jus soli citizenship, are being deployed in service of a nativist agenda. As legal scholars Cassandre Burke Robertson and Irina D. Manta have observed in the context of denaturalization, even if relatively few people are affected, the implications can still be massive. The small number of people affected to date by the above policies obscures broader and deeply problematic implications for immigrant communities and individuals subjected to heightened scrutiny, regardless of the administration at the helm. As Robertson and Manta argue: It is no answer to say that not all naturalized citizens will, or even can, be so targeted. The problem is not the number of citizens subject to denaturalization proceedings, but rather the arbitrariness of who is targeted – and the political message that is sent by that targeting. . . . That feeling of exclusion creates a chilling effect as individuals fear for their own status. Actions “targeting the foreign-born” have been recognized by scholars as “threaten[ing] the social contract and expos[ing] the vulnerability of immigrants’ rights to political manipulation.”10 Executive Summary 13