A child with derivative citizenship has no recourse in preventing his or her own denaturalization by proxy. As noted by one court, “the derivative citizenship of a child…may be effectively cancelled without a chance to contest it, if a prior denaturalization decree has conclusive effect.”323 The policy of retroactive citizenship stripping can have serious, negative consequences on a child. To illustrate, the Seventh Circuit held that a three-year-old child, who had acquired citizenship through his father, was not entitled to the appointment of a guardian ad litem to protect the child’s interests, since the child’s “rights, if any, were derived solely from the status of his father.”324 Data and information on individuals who have lost, or may lose, derivative U.S. citizenship due to a denaturalization is not publicly available and there is very limited case law on the issue. This is not surprising, given that the law does not provide a remedy for derivatives who have lost their citizenship, since it is considered void ab initio based on the principal’s denaturalization. A leaked 2008 DHS document called the “Denaturalization Investigations Handbook,” sets out steps for how to investigate a denaturalization case. The first step requires agents to “[i] dentify family member(s) whose status is dependent on the naturalized subject,” and “[l]ocate and review all files relating to the naturalized person, such as the naturalized person’s immediate family members.”325 Such instructions make clear that DHS is investigating not just single individuals, but whole family groups, targeting innocent people for an error made by a relative. President Trump has repeatedly voiced opposition to so-called “chain migration.” Since a naturalized citizen has the right to petition for family members to join them in the United States, there may be a risk to those who came to the United States via petition by the naturalized citizen. This may mean an exponentially higher pool of individuals at-risk of denaturalization and removal should the administration determine their citizenship is void on account of the original naturalized citizen’s citizenship being revoked, unless they have some separate basis upon which to claim a right to remain in the United States. The Trump administration’s commitment to increasing denaturalizations can be seen to have multiple deleterious effects on individuals, families, communities, and even the body politic. But even that litany of ill effects does not include one of the harshest possible results of denaturalizations, statelessness, which is considered in the next section. Statelessness For an individual, one of the worst possible results of denaturalization is to become stateless. A stateless person literally has no place to be in the world, and lives, in the words of one stateless person, “a kind of half-life,” completely stripped of the state protection necessary to make rights real in practice.326 Taking away a person’s citizenship is one of the most severe sanctions 76 UNMAKING AMERICANS