Joy Reid has cautioned President Donald Trump about the potential ramifications of denaturalizing and deporting citizens with a simple message: your policy could later be used against your family members.
While touring the ICE detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz“ in the Florida Everglades earlier this week, the president discussed the possibility of deporting citizens, telling reporters, “They’re not new to our country. They’re old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth.”
In a Thursday interview with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) on The Joy Reid Show, Reid countered this proposal with her own. Reid told Jayapal, “If you give the president of the United States monarchical-like powers to say, ‘I don’t like your views, I don’t like your take on issues, I don’t like that you’re too liberal, you’re not conservative enough, I’m just gonna take away your naturalized citizenship,‘ well… If we ever get a Democratic president, they could say, ‘I don’t like Melania Trump. She wasn’t born here. She was born in Slovenia. She is a naturalized citizen. She’s outta here.‘”
Reid continued, invoking Trump’s first wife Ivana, who died in 2022, and the couple’s three children, telling Jayapal, “And by the way, Ivana Trump, the late Ivana Trump, who’s buried in the golf course in New Jersey in Donald Trump’s golf club, she wasn’t an American citizen. And three of her children are Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka.”
“And maybe the next Democratic president says, ‘You know what? I don’t like the Trumps. And so we’re gonna denaturalize all of the Trump children, whose mother was a foreigner at the time,‘” she continued.
Reid argued, “This opens a huge door, Congresswoman, because that means that any future president can decide that they don’t like the Trumps and don’t want them here and want Melania gone. And they could just denaturalize and deport her, and she’d be outta here.”
Reid also mentioned State Secretary Marco Rubio, whose Cuban-born grandfather was ordered to be deported in the 1960s after entering the U.S. without a valid visa, but who did not leave as ordered, existing in legal limbo until eventually securing refugee status.
The discussion comes on the heels of a memo issued by the Justice Department earlier this week that gives U.S. Attorneys discretion over initiating denaturalization proceedings against people who have committed certain crimes.
It also comes after Trump threatened the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, with arrest and deportation, baselessly alleging that Mamdani, who has lived in the U.S. since the age of 7 and who became a naturalized citizen in 2018, was in the country illegally.
Trump scored a win in his plan to roll back birthright citizenship last week, when the Supreme Court limited legal attempts to block his changes from taking effect while declining to rule on the constitutionality of his proposal.
The president described the “big, amazing” decision, which could see more than half of the country’s 50 states implement Trump’s policy of preventing children of undocumented immigrants from becoming citizens, as a “monumental victory for the constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
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