Americans whose behavior showed “true allegiance and fidelity to a foreign country rather than the United States.”57 In a 1943 public statement, Biddle disclosed that internment was the intended result of denaturalization, saying, “Deprived of their citizenship, they automatically become alien enemies. As such I shall order them interned for the duration of the war.”58 Immediately after World War II, the United States denationalized thousands of U.S.-born Japanese-Americans, following the mass internment program implemented during the war.59 Yet in the time since, the American drive for denaturalization has waned. As the threat of communism subsided in the last decades of the 20th century, “government officials lost their appetite for pursuing vast numbers of denaturalization cases.”60 But more recently, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers have repeatedly proposed expanding expatriation (denationalizing native-born Americans) powers as a counterterrorism tool.61 At the time of writing, these efforts have “fallen flat.”62 Denaturalization prosecutions are currently brought against suspected terrorists using existing statutes, and a specialized National Security Unit within the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation was established to handle such cases. Securing Citizenship A series of Supreme Court cases in the 1950s and 1960s significantly curtailed the practices of expatriation and denaturalization based on voluntary behavior.63 The Schneiderman case (1943) had already imposed a higher burden of proof on the government—clear and convincing evidence—in cases charging a lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution as a ground for denaturalization (explored further in Chapter II, Denaturalizations). In Trop v. Dulles (1958), in a split opinion, the Supreme Court invalidated the use of expatriation as a punishment. Albert Trop was denationalized under a provision of the 1940 Nationality Act after receiving a conviction and dishonorable discharge for desertion while serving in Morocco during World War II. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s plurality opinion is often cited for its lofty language regarding the cruelty of expatriation, a violation of the Eighth Amendment, he wrote, as “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”64 Trop, a native-born American, was stateless as a result of his expatriation, a fact that solicited an impassioned passage in Warren’s opinion: The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. His very existence is at the sufferance of the country in which he happens to find himself. While any one country may accord him some rights and, presumably, as long as he remained in this country, he would enjoy the limited rights of an alien, no country need do so, because he is stateless. Furthermore, his enjoyment of even the limited rights of an alien might be subject to termination at any time by reason of deportation. In short, the expatriate has lost the right to have rights. I. History and Context 25