Trump’s Quixotic Push to Denaturalize U.S. Citizens
It is impossible to reconcile the citizenship clause’s absolutist text—and its lack of a mechanism for depriving someone of U.S. citizenship—with the Perez decision’s reliance on “experience” or its focus on whether a U.S. citizen’s activities cause “serious embarrassments to the government.” Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing in dissent from Perez, laid out the fundamental importance of American citizenship in plain, civic-republican terms.
Citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights. Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen. He has no lawful claim to protection from any nation, and no nation may assert rights on his behalf. His very existence is at the sufferance of the state within whose borders he happens to be. In this country, the expatriate would presumably enjoy, at most, only the limited rights and privileges of aliens, and, like the alien, he might even be subject to deportation, and thereby deprived of the right to assert any rights. This government was not established with power to decree this fate.
The Supreme Court corrected its error and embraced Warren’s reasoning in the 1967 case Afroyim v. Rusk. Beys Afroyim, a Polish-born man who had been a U.S. citizen since 1926, traveled to Israel in 1950 and voted in its Knesset elections in 1951. Roughly a decade later, in 1960, Afroyim submitted an application to renew his U.S. passport. The State Department refused his renewal request on the grounds that he had forfeited his U.S. citizenship by voting in an Israeli election.
In response, Afroyim filed a lawsuit against the State Department. He argued that the refusal both violated his due-process rights and ran contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. He had a much more receptive audience at the Supreme Court than Perez did. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the court in Afroyim, noted that Perez “has been a source of controversy and confusion ever since” it was decided. Since then, he explained, the Supreme Court had “consistently invalidated on a case-by-case basis various other statutory sections providing for involuntary expatriation” and also “refused to hold that citizens can be expatriated without their voluntary renunciation of citizenship.”