President Donald Trump's latest threat to extend mass deportations to naturalized U.S. citizens would lead Republicans into disaster in the midterms, a conservative legal scholar warned on Friday.
Trump's proposal came in a rant on Thanksgiving, in response to the shooting of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., allegedly carried out by an Afghan national who was granted a special immigrant visa for helping the U.S. military and CIA.
"I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions ... end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization," said Trump.
"These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process," Trump continued. "Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation."
"Denaturalize" means stripping citizenship from immigrants who have already been granted it, potentially years or decades ago — and that will lead to utter chaos that will get the GOP wiped out in elections, wrote Daniel Di Martino, a conservative Manhattan Institute scholar who fled tyranny in his homeland.
"If legal immigrants begin to be deported without having committed any crime, get ready for Republicans to lose the midterms by a landslide," Martino wrote on X. "In addition to the havoc and economic destruction a large travel ban would cause ahead of the World Soccer Cup next year."
"There are ways to do this, and ways not to," he continued. Rather than "retroactively harming people," he argued, it would be better to reform regulations that determine whether an immigrant is a "public charge," or net recipient of federal assistance, during the naturalization process.
