of welcoming new Americans. To understand the current administration’s approach to citizenship, one can follow the money, or follow the president’s rhetoric. Both point to an administration seeking to narrow access to citizenship, raise the financial and temporal costs, and remake denaturalization from an obscure and rarely used mechanism reserved for heinous criminals into a pliable enforcement tool wielded against marginalized groups. In reality, the statutes themselves were not well designed to constrain the executive from expanding the scope of a denaturalization program, and subsequent Supreme Court precedents, valuable though they may be for articulating the principles of a secure U.S. citizenship for all, likewise fail to rein in the prerogatives of a zealous anti-immigrant platform. Chilling Effects Today’s denaturalization efforts may have a tenuous connection to the integrity of the immigration system, but they are having a chilling effect on specific groups that reaches well beyond those eligible to apply for naturalization. Across the country, the prospect of denaturalization is causing immigrant communities to reduce the free exercise of their rights as citizens or residents, including seeking out immigration benefits or engaging in the social and political life of the country.316 In several of the cases investigated by the Justice Initiative, it appeared that denaturalization procedures resulted after the target applied for a passport or government service, subjecting that person to scrutiny. By linking loss of citizenship to applications for a public or immigration-related benefit, the Trump administration may be seeking to dissuade naturalized citizens (or even all immigrants) from engaging with the state, and linking citizenship troubles with rhetoric stigmatizing social assistance. A New York Times opinion piece noted that: The number of potential denaturalization cases that are being considered is reportedly in the thousands, so the Trump administration can’t hope to permanently alter the demographics of the country with this unwieldy device. Maybe it doesn’t have to. It’s possible that the true intent — and the probable consequence — of the Trump policy is that naturalized citizens will not actively participate in political activity for fear that some old mistake on their forms could put their status in jeopardy.317 Interviews conducted for this report confirmed the chilling social impact that the Trump administration’s denaturalizations are having. Naturalized Americans and wider immigrant communities suffer a sense of subordination, social paralysis, and surveillance. Whether unintentionally or by design, denaturalizations are reducing the political participation—and hence political power—of immigrants, including naturalized citizens. 74 UNMAKING AMERICANS