Homan: ‘If you’re here illegally and have a kid, that’s on you’ | The Conversation
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Salena Zito recounts Trump’s assassination attempt one year later | The Conversation
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Trump Border Czar Tom Homan: ‘There Will Be No Amnesty’ | The Conversation
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Border czar Tom Homan defends ICE agents wearing masks | The Conversation
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Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, is a longtime immigration law enforcement official now tasked with helping implement the administration’s massive deportation campaign.
In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns, Homan explains what will be done with the $170 billion recently passed by Congress to help the effort, defends the tactics of ICE agents, and has a message for those who say undocumented farmworkers should be spared.
“People who say ‘don’t arrest workers,’ they don’t understand the whole ugly underbelly of illegal immigration the way I do,” he tells Burns.
Plus, on the one year anniversary of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, PA, journalist Salena Zito shares her first-hand account as described in her new book, “Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland.”
Listen and subscribe to The Conversation with Dasha Burns on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Legal battles over President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship continued on July 10, 2025, after a New Hampshire federal district judge issued a preliminary injunction that will, if it’s not reversed, prevent federal officials from enforcing the order nationally.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee, asserts that this policy of “highly questionable constitutionality … constitutes irreparable harm.”
In its ruling in late June, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to deny citizenship to infants born to undocumented parents in many parts of the nation where individuals or states had not successfully sued to prevent implementation – including a number of mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Southern states.
Trump’s executive order limits U.S. citizenship by birth to those who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. It denies citizenship to those born to undocumented people within the U.S. and to the children of those on student, work, tourist and certain other types of visas.
The preliminary injunction is on hold for seven days to allow the Trump administration to appeal.
The June 27 Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship limited the ability of lower-court judges to issue universal injunctions to block such executive orders nationwide.
Laplante was able to avoid that limit on issuing a nationwide injunction by certifying the case as a class action lawsuit encompassing all children affected by the birthright order, following a pathway suggested by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Pathways beyond universal injunctions
In its recent birthright citizenship ruling, Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court noted that plaintiffs could still seek broad relief by filing such class action lawsuits that would join together large groups of individuals facing the same injury from the law they were challenging.
And that’s what happened.
Litigants filed suit in New Hampshire’s district court the same day that the Supreme Court decided CASA. They asked the court to certify a class consisting of infants born on or after Feb. 20, 2025, who would be covered by the order and their parents or prospective parents. The court allowed the suit to proceed as a class action for these infants.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
What if this injunction doesn’t stick?
If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit or the Supreme Court invalidates the New Hampshire court’s newest national injunction and another injunction is not issued in a different venue, the order will then go into effect anywhere it is not currently barred from doing so. Implementation could begin in as many as 28 states where state attorneys general have not challenged the Trump birthright citizenship policy if no other individuals or groups secure relief.
As political science scholars who study race and immigration policy, we believe that, if implemented piecemeal, Trump’s birthright citizenship order would create administrative chaos for states determining the citizenship status of infants born in the United States. And it could lead to the first instances since the 1860s of infants being born in the U.S. being denied citizenship categorically.
States’ role in establishing citizenship
Almost all U.S.-born children are issued birth certificates by the state in which they are born.
The federal government’s standardized form, the U.S. standard certificate of live birth, collects data on parents’ birthplaces and their Social Security numbers, if available, and provides the information states need to issue birth certificates.
But it does not ask questions about their citizenship or immigration status. And no national standard exists for the format for state birth certificates, which traditionally have been the simplest way for people born in the U.S. to establish citizenship.
If Trump’s executive order goes into effect, birth certificates issued by local hospitals would be insufficient evidence of eligibility for federal government documents acknowledging citizenship. The order would require new efforts, including identification of parents’ citizenship status, before authorizing the issuance of any federal document acknowledging citizenship.
Since states control the process of issuing birth certificates, they will respond differently to implementation efforts. Several states filed a lawsuit on Jan. 21 to block the birthright citizenship order. And they will likely pursue an arsenal of strategies to resist, delay and complicate implementation.
While the Supreme Court has not yet confirmed that these states have standing to challenge the order, successful litigation could bar implementation in up to 18 states and the District of Columbia if injunctions are narrowly framed, or nationally if lawyers can persuade judges that disentangling the effects on a state-by-state basis will be too difficult.
Other states will likely collaborate with the administration to deny citizenship to some infants. Some, like Texas, had earlier attempted to make it particularly hard for undocumented parents to obtain birth certificates for their children.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Potential for chaos
If the Supreme Court rejects attempts to block the executive order nationally again, implementation will be complicated.
That’s because it would operate in some places and toward some individuals while being legally blocked in other places and toward others, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her Trump v. CASA dissent.
Children born to plaintiffs anywhere in the nation who have successfully sued would have access to citizenship, while other children possibly born in the same hospitals – but not among the groups named in the suits – would not.
Babies born in the days before implementation would have substantially different rights than those born the day after. Parents’ ethnicity and countries of origin would likely influence which infants are ultimately granted or denied citizenship.
That’s because some infants and parents would be more likely to generate scrutiny from hospital employees and officials than others, including Hispanics, women giving birth near the border, and women giving birth in states such as Florida where officials are likely to collaborate enthusiastically with enforcement.
The consequences could be profound.
Some infants would become stateless, having no right to citizenship in another nation. Many people born in the U.S. would be denied government benefits, Social Security numbers and the ability to work legally in the U.S.
With the constitutionality of the executive order still unresolved, it’s unclear when, if ever, some infants born in the U.S. will be the first in the modern era to be denied citizenship.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
Border czar Tom Homan says ‘no amnesty’ for undocumented farmworkers | The Conversation
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Homan unsure of status of the eight men deported to South Sudan | The Conversation
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The Trump administration wants to take away citizenship from naturalized Americans on a massive scale.
While a recent Justice Department memo prioritizes national security cases, it directs the department to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence” across 10 broad priority categories.
Denaturalization is different from deportation, which removes noncitizens from the country. With civil denaturalization, the government files a lawsuit to strip people’s U.S. citizenship after they have become citizens, turning them back into noncitizens who can then be deported.
The government can only do this in specific situations. It must prove someone “illegally procured” citizenship by not meeting the requirements, or that they lied or hid important facts during the citizenship process.
The Trump administration’s “maximal enforcement” approach means pursuing any case where evidence might support taking away citizenship, regardless of priority level or strength of evidence. As our earlier research documented, this has already led to cases like that of Baljinder Singh, whose citizenship was revoked based on a name discrepancy that could easily have resulted from a translator’s error rather than intentional fraud.
A brief history
For most of American history, taking away citizenship has been rare. But it increased dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s during the Red Scare period characterized by intense suspicion of communism. The United States government targeted people it thought were communists or Nazi supporters. Between 1907 and 1967, over 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship this way.
Everything changed in 1967 when the Supreme Court decided Afroyim v. Rusk. The court said the government usually cannot take away citizenship without the person’s consent. It left open only cases involving fraud during the citizenship process.
After this decision, denaturalization became extremely rare. From 1968 to 2013, fewer than 150 people lost their citizenship, mostly war criminals who had hidden their past.
AP Photo/Herbert K. White
How the process works
In criminal lawsuits, defendants get free lawyers if they can’t afford one. They get jury trials. The government must prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” – the highest standard of proof.
But in most denaturalization cases, the government files a civil suit, where none of these protections exist.
People facing denaturalization get no free lawyer, meaning poor defendants often face the government alone. There’s no jury trial – just a judge deciding whether someone deserves to remain American. The burden of proof is lower – “clear and convincing evidence” instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Most important, there’s no time limit, so the government can go back decades to build cases.
As law professors who study citizenship, we believe this system violates basic constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court has called citizenship a fundamental right. Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1958 described it as the “right to have rights.”
In our reading of the law, taking away such a fundamental right through civil procedures that lack basic constitutional protection – no right to counsel for those who can’t afford it, no jury trial, and a lower burden of proof – seems to violate the due process of law required by the Constitution when the government seeks to deprive someone of their rights.
The bigger problem is what citizenship-stripping policy does to democracy.
When the government can strip citizenship from naturalized Americans for decades-old conduct through civil procedures with minimal due process protection – pursuing cases based on evidence that might not meet criminal standards – it undermines the security and permanence that citizenship is supposed to provide. This creates a system where naturalized citizens face ongoing vulnerability that can last their entire lives, potentially chilling their full participation in American democracy.
The Justice Department memo establishes 10 priority categories for denaturalization cases. They range from national security threats and war crimes to various forms of fraud, financial crimes and, most importantly, any other cases it deems “sufficiently important to pursue.” This “maximal enforcement” approach means pursuing not just clear cases of fraud, but also any case where evidence might support taking away citizenship, no matter how weak or old the evidence is.
This creates fear throughout immigrant communities.
About 20 million naturalized Americans now must worry that any mistake in their decades-old immigration paperwork could cost them their citizenship.
A two-tier system
This policy effectively creates two different types of American citizens. Native-born Americans never have to worry about losing their citizenship, no matter what they do. But naturalized Americans face ongoing vulnerability that can last their entire lives.
This has already happened. A woman who became a naturalized citizen in 2007 helped her boss with paperwork that was later used in fraud. She cooperated with the FBI investigation, was characterized by prosecutors as only a “minimal participant,” completed her sentence, and still faced losing her citizenship decades later because she didn’t report the crime on her citizenship application – even though she hadn’t been charged at the time.
AP Photo/Julio Cortez
The Justice Department’s directive to “maximally pursue” cases across 10 broad categories – combined with the first Trump administration’s efforts to review over 700,000 naturalization files – represents an unprecedented expansion of denaturalization efforts.
The policy will almost certainly face legal challenges on constitutional grounds, but the damage may already be done. When naturalized citizens fear their status could be revoked, it undermines the security and permanence that citizenship is supposed to provide.
The Supreme Court, in Afroyim v. Rusk, was focused on protecting existing citizens from losing their citizenship. The constitutional principle behind that decision – that citizenship is a fundamental right which can’t be arbitrarily taken away by whoever happens to be in power – applies equally to how the government handles denaturalization cases today.
The Trump administration’s directive, combined with court procedures that lack basic constitutional protections, risks creating a system that the Afroyim v. Rusk decision sought to prevent – one where, as the Supreme Court said, “A group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.”
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.
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