President Donald Trump has doubled down on his push to revoke some Americans’ citizenship.
In the wake of Wednesday’s shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by an Afghan national, Trump declared that he would “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility” in a Truth Social post.
On Sunday, a reporter questioned Trump aboard Air Force One about his vow to “denaturalize” American citizens.
“You mean people that are in here that shouldn’t be here?” replied Trump, who was flying back to D.C. after spending Thanksgiving weekend at his resort in Palm Beach.
“Well, that became Americans,” the reporter said. “Are you trying to revoke their citizenship?”
“We’ll see, I mean, yeah, we have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing,” the 79-year-old president said. “If I have the power to do it, I’m not sure that I do, but if I do, I would denaturalize, absolutely.”
Only naturalized Americans can be stripped of their citizenship. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services states this can happen only if they are found to have intentionally concealed material facts or misrepresented themselves during naturalization. Any revocation must go through federal court.
Trump’s Scottish-born mother became a naturalized citizen in 1942 as World War II raged in Europe, according to The New Yorker.
Trump paused all asylum decisions following the shooting of the guardsmen, which left Sarah Beckstrom, 20, dead and Andrew Wolfe, 24, critically injured.
The president told reporters on Sunday that the pause could last “a long time,” adding, “We don’t want those people.”
The alleged shooter, 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is said to have been vetted on his arrival in 2021 and went on to have his asylum claim approved in April this year, when Trump was in the White House.
“We got a lot of people in our country that shouldn’t be here. And they came in through Biden. And he was the worst president in the history of our country,” Trump said.
Railing against “people coming into our country telling us what to do” and rehashing baseless claims that Somalians are “taking over” Minnesota, the president then once again turned his fire on Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia but has lived in the U.S. for 30 years.
“We frankly don’t need their people coming into our country telling us what to do. I’m talking about like, Somalia, where you have a congressman, goes around telling everybody about our constitution and yet she supposedly came into our country by marrying her brother,” said Trump, reviving a rumor that Omar has called “absolutely false and ridiculous.”
He added, “Well if that’s true, she shouldn’t be a congressman and we should throw her the hell out of our country.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Omar’s office for comment.
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