Today, the United States is home to over 21 million naturalized citizens.5 Although we cannot know the number of people who will be made stateless through the denaturalization investigations currently underway or yet to come, we know that these individuals are likely to face pernicious hardships. Indefinite vulnerability to the most punitive measures at the state’s disposal—raids, arrests, detention—is the plight of stateless persons in the U.S. and elsewhere. Denial and Revocation of Documentation of U.S. Citizenship In the United States, as in many other countries today, the rapid introduction of computer record keeping and increasingly automated and interoperable systems for identity management have drastically changed the evidentiary building blocks of citizenship. Research conducted for this report reveals that a combination of institutional design and exceedingly limited legal protection against harm permits state-sanctioned profiling by immigration and law enforcement officials based on race, gender, and class, with disastrous consequences for affected communities. Just as more systematic, politically motivated animus has combined with new technology to heighten the vulnerability of naturalized citizens to denaturalization, so are these same trends exposing all citizens to the heightened risk of passport denial and/or revocation. Individuals who have lived as U.S. citizens for decades can suddenly find themselves stripped of their passports, with complex and expensive legal proceedings, detention, family separation, and humiliation standing between them and confirmation that they are, in fact, Americans. The current and ongoing attack on American citizens and, indeed, on the very definition of American citizenship, must cease. Instead, the government’s expansive citizenship powers must be exercised with restraint and accountability. Political Attacks on Citizenship by Birth in the United States Acquiring U.S. citizenship through being born on U.S. territory is well established as a matter of law and practice. Yet proposals to restrict access to citizenship by birth on the territory of the United States are not new—although they have gained new prominence under the current administration. This mode of acquiring nationality is sometimes referred to by the Latin legal term jus soli and commonly called “birthright citizenship” in the United States context. The U.S. Constitution and longstanding Supreme Court precedent make it very difficult to institute restrictions on access to citizenship by birth on the territory. Rather than dwell on the legal debates, which are covered in depth elsewhere, this report reveals the Trump administration’s systematic efforts to undermine the security of citizenship for certain groups by using other, more readily available, tools like denaturalization and deprivation or denial of proof of U.S. citizenship. These efforts are suspect given the racist and xenophobic platform they advance, and must be resisted through urgently needed legal reforms, rather than wishful thinking that established norms will hold. Executive Summary 9