The Miami Herald on how becoming a US citizen is no longer enough to escape Trump’s crackdown:

The de-naturalization of foreign-born U.S. citizens isn’t new and has been done under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But the Trump administration’s latest guidance telling federal prosecutors to “prioritize” such cases raises a significant question: How will be this new priority be focused? Will it be stretched to go beyond obvious cases of immigration fraud to become a political weapon deployed in service of the president’s goal to deport ... foreigners?

Think of how the administration has gone after students ... who have protested in support of Palestinians, or how Republicans are calling for the de-naturalization of Democrats born abroad. ...

The stories most people have probably heard about foreign-born Americans being stripped of citizenship are the classic cases of someone lying in their application — Germans who didn’t disclose their ties to the Nazis after the war, for example, or people who engaged in fake marriages to obtain immigration status.

There’s no doubt that people who lie on their immigration documents need to be scrutinized, but immigration and defense attorneys worry new Department of Justice guidelines are broad and vague, allowing for a potential expansion of what offenses could result in a person being stripped of citizenship.

Luckily, a federal judge must decide whether there are grounds to take such a drastic action, but that’s a long and expensive process that can cause turmoil in people’s lives and destroy their reputations. Also, these proceedings take place in civil court, where judges apply a lower standard of evidence than in criminal cases.

According to a recent Department of Justice memo, the administration wants to go beyond seeking de-naturalization in cases of people who may have lied or done something illegal while seeking citizenship. The DOJ wants to broaden that scope to include crimes people committed after becoming citizens, which is an “untested legal frontier.” In fact, the administration might bump up against a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that found that the 14th Amendment is designed to “protect every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship.”

With about 24.5 million naturalized citizens in the U.S., it’s likely that the DOJ will focus on bigger cases involving people who committed serious offenses first. Yet stripping someone of their citizenship should be a tall task.

Citizens found guilty of a crime should pay their debt to society, but de-naturalizing them should be used only in the most extreme cases. ...