The moral order that generated the human rights movement emerged in no small measure to answer the harrowing realization that human beings can commit unspeakable harms when basic decency is abandoned, leaving some cast aside in a state of exception.689 International protections against statelessness and arbitrary deprivation of nationality, which Americans imagined and negotiated with other states, seek to respond to this challenge and must be applied within the United States. In the meantime, every presumption available in the domestic system should be activated to protect against placing human beings in a moral and legal vacuum. From a human rights perspective, on both sides of the “citizenship line”690 human agency and freedom must ultimately prevail. Some key principles drawn from the international context serve as a ready guide for reforming practice in the U.S. Most urgently, reforms are needed to ensure that distinctions between citizens and aliens are only legitimate to the extent that they are “proportionately tailored to achieve a legitimate aim grounded in the substantive racial equality framework”691 and maintain a standard of protection and treatment that evinces a commitment to the universality of human rights. Specific recommendations that would begin to achieve this aim are presented in this report’s Executive Summary. They include uniformly placing the initial burden on the U.S. government to prove non-citizenship where citizenship questions arise, held to a sufficiently high standard to prevent arbitrary abuse, and with a comprehensive effort to expand access to meaningful remedies when proof of U.S. citizenship is in question. Such safeguards are especially needed in today’s climate of politicized attacks on citizenship, including the attacks on jus soli citizenship explored in the next chapter. 152 UNMAKING AMERICANS