Though it took nearly two centuries, citizenship in the United States has been a settled question. President Donald Trump’s second administration is actively unsettling it.
On Inauguration Day last year, Trump issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship, directly challenging established guarantees. The Supreme Court, with its growing appetite for revisiting precedent, said it will consider the issue and decide this summer whether presidents have the final say on who can be American. But this is not just another episode of constitutional brinkmanship. These developments reveal a deeper shift: Citizenship is increasingly treated as conditional rather than absolute, a credential more than an obligation. In practice, its legal meaning and the rights it confers have been eclipsed by partisan judgments about who belongs.
The consequences of this change are dire. By deporting military veterans who are legal residents, the administration challenges the notion that service and sacrifice determine belonging in America. Instead, it reinforces the idea that citizenship is primarily a bureaucratic label, even for veterans with green cards who have risked their lives for the country. The searches, questioning and detention of U.S. citizens, whose status is sometimes challenged because of their ethnicity, diminish the idea of citizenship as both a shared national identity and recognized membership. And the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an immigration agent in Minneapolis underscores how tenuous rights are even for citizens. Taken together, they outline a country in which citizenship is a fickle designation subject to the whims of politicians.
History confirms this is a troubling pattern. For nearly 100 years following the nation’s founding, citizenship was expressly withheld from Black Americans and reserved for “free white person … of good character,” as articulated in the Naturalization Act of 1790, making government the sole arbiter of who qualifies. In practice, citizenship was less of a rights guarantee and more a badge granted by the state, signaling who belonged and who did not. The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship, the nation’s first forward-looking color-blind provision, but its promise was hollowed out almost immediately by the establishment of race-based second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow era and by the series of restrictive immigration laws that set quotas favoring White Europeans. The lesson is clear: For much of U.S. history, citizenship has been treated as a conditional honor bestowed by government that can be effectively withdrawn for any reason — or for no reason at all.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric exposes citizenship as a fragile and politicized status. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem promised that “anyone who is a citizen of this country, or is here legally, has nothing to fear.” Yet the president threatened to strip the citizenship of Somali-Americans, saying, “I would do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has labeled birthright citizenship a “scam,” “illegal” and “suicidal,” and has argued for a nationwide denaturalization project.
Several congressional Republicans have called for the deportations of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Illinois) — each a naturalized or birthright citizen. And under Noem’s oversight, a border patrol agent deployed to Chicago shot a U.S. citizen five times and later appeared to brag to his colleagues about the shooting. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your books boys,” the agent wrote in a text message that was presented during a court hearing.
There’s no public mandate for this. Two-thirds of Americans support the Constitution’s guarantee that all children born on U.S. soil are automatically citizens, regardless of their parents’ status. When asked what makes a good citizen, they cite civic responsibilities such as voting, paying taxes, obeying the law and protesting government when it’s in the wrong. Americans believe citizenship carries duties as well as rights — a consensus at odds with a government that increasingly wields membership as an erratic political tool, conferring status selectively rather than ensuring the equal protection of rights for all.
The tragedy of Good’s death highlights this shortcoming. She was a mother, a poet, a citizen — a member of her community looking out for her neighbors — yet her life and rights were disregarded in an instant by the very government charged with protecting them. Citizenship did not protect her and others from those who wear the shield; constitutional rights ensuring due process, freedom to protest, and the protection from seizure and excessive force fell away as easily as a badge with no backing.
Democracies can survive policy disagreements about immigration and constitutional interpretations. But they cannot survive when citizenship no longer imposes obligation — on the state, on institutions or on those who wield force in its name. Restoring citizenship to its fullest meaning requires more than rhetoric or court rulings. It should not hinge on election outcomes or swaggering executives flouting the law. It is the root of democracy. Good’s life — and her death — remind us that being a good citizen is no protection when the state decides who counts.
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