In each area, public statements, official documents, and media reports over the past two years have cited worrying actual or proposed shifts in policy that merit the in-depth study provided here. Denaturalization Since 2008, the U.S. government has undertaken initiatives that rely on the digitization of old immigration-related fingerprint data collected on paper cards in the 1980s and 1990s but never included in newer, digital government records. These old files are being scanned, digitized, and matched against existing digital records to identify duplicate entries in immigration files that might indicate fraudulent acquisition of U.S. citizenship. Between 2008 and 2016, these efforts came to be associated with a program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) known as Operation Janus, which was officially disbanded in 2016. This digitization, when combined with increasing official animosity toward immigration, non-citizens, and naturalized citizens, has the potential to increase substantially the use of denaturalization as a political weapon. In January 2018, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service announced the formation of a dedicated team to continue this work, with the intention to refer approximately 1,600 people for prosecution based on a review of an estimated 700,000 immigration files.2 This effort, known as Operation Second Look, is a successor to Operation Janus in terms of its approach of scrutinizing, indiscriminately and in bulk, old records for evidence of fraud. President Trump has consistently issued derogatory public statements singling out immigrants based on their country of origin. He has also stated, “We should have more people from Norway.”3 That statement has familiar echoes in history: “Nordic” people topped the list of sought-after ethnic categories in the race-based quota system introduced in the United States under the National Origin Act of 1924, a piece of legislation so bold in its white nationalist framework that it served as inspiration for the Nazis’ Nuremberg Race Laws. In preparing this report, the Open Society Justice Initiative reviewed 168 denaturalization cases initiated between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2018. The report also presents detailed historical information on the use and misuse of the two U.S. denaturalization statutes—criminal and civil—that have been in place since the turn of the 20th century. From the 1960s until the early 2000s, denaturalization cases were extremely rare. These cases “did little to disrupt an overall sense of citizenship security” because their principal targets were alleged Nazis and, since 2004, other war criminals.4 However, because of this normative restraint within the Department of Justice across successive administrations, constitutional protections for those threatened with denaturalization languished unaddressed. Currently, there is no right to counsel in civil proceedings, and while incomplete information on prioritization and targeting prevents a comprehensive review of possible disparate impacts, individuals are subject to removal while cases are still pending—thus frustrating access to appeal rights— and denaturalizations have and will continue to create statelessness in the United States. 8 UNMAKING AMERICANS