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In the midst of President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s totalizing immigration crackdown—an effort that has come to involve agents and soldiers in full combat gear marching and riding armored vehicles through major American cities—sympathetic and often outraged U.S. citizens have seen themselves as allies and protectors who can face off against the administration’s overreaches while incurring less risk.

In recent weeks, though, that sense of being beyond the scope of immigration agents has curdled, and naturalized citizens in particular are beginning to worry that after Trump has targeted immigrants lacking legal status, temporary status holders, and permanent residents, they’re next. Last month, a memo issued by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate cited “prioritizing denaturalization” as one of five top issues for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, writing that DOJ would “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.”

A long list of potential targets had the expected inclusion of suspected gang members and fraudsters, along with the rather broad categories of people “who acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations”; those who “pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism, espionage”; and “other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”

Those who’ve been following the administration’s crackdown immediately recognized the latter two points in particular as a catchall for people engaged in disfavored speech and political activity, like Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student, Palestinian student organizer, and green card holder detained by federal agents in March. That this effort could be used as a form of political policing was further bolstered in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, after which right-wing figures, including sitting Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, called for the naturalized New Yorker to be stripped of citizenship and deported. Ogles sent a letter to that effect to Attorney General Pam Bondi before Trump........

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