Denaturalizing Mamdani: The Demonization of Brown Men

The ugly and entrenched prejudices against Brown Muslim Men is on full display following Mamdani's victory.

Well then “we’ll have to arrest him.” This is what Donald Trump had to say about NYC Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s pledge that he would not let masked ICE agents round up immigrants. Other Trump supporters and members of his Administration have forwarded similar sorts of possibilities. Andy Ogles a right wing Trump supporter from Tennessee has said that Mamdani’s citizenship should be revoked because he “concealed his support for terrorism” during the naturalization process. Following his statement, Karoline Leavitt Trump’s shrill and obnoxious Press Secretary also insisted that Mamdani should be investigated because he may have hidden his support for terrorism during the naturalization process.

These statements are not just threats. In the past few months, the Trump Administration has been laying the groundwork for denaturalizing US citizens pouring money and staff into an initiative that could likely target thousands of Americans. Since I wrote about this for The Nation a few weeks earlier, things have sped up.Among them this leaked memo from the U.S Justice Department that asks attorneys to institute civil proceedings against naturalized citizens if they believe “illegally procured naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation” The frightening thing about this memo is that it is deliberately vague and broad in scope.

In Zohran Mamdani’s case the issue will boil down to whether support for Palestinian statehood and anti-Zionism can be painted as “terrorist sympathies.” In the cases of Columbia students who are on visas-support for Palestine has been equivocated with having terrorist sympathies and visas have been revoked. The Administration is finding this harder to do in the case of green card holder Mahmoud Khalil who was recently freed from detention on bail and whom President Trump has unilaterally labeled a “terrorist sympathizer” because he supports a free Palestinian state. His ultimate fate will also rest on whether the Trump Administration is permitted to say that each and every supporter for Palestinian statehood is somehow automatically a terrorist or terror sympathizer.

Denaturalization proceedings are civil proceedings. This means that the burden of proof is only “clear and convincing evidence” rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases. This lower burden of proof makes it easy for Trump Administration officials, particularly those working in conservative districts where Trump appointed judges rule the roost, to allow denaturalization to proceed. While it may still be difficult for the Administration to prove that Mamdani illegally procured citizenship or hid a material fact it will certainly not stop them from trying.

This also serves the Administration’s purposes in other ways. Let’s remember that the onslaught against immigrants, the open air camps that are being inaugurated everyday, the cage like conditions in which detainees are held and now the divestment of citizenship from naturalized citizens is all in furtherance of building a white Christian nationalist America where everyone other than white christian men is a lower class of citizen. The public threats against Mamdani are part of a program to normalize the degradation and mistreatment of all immigrants such that white Americans can feel justified in their sense of racial superiority.

The onus of action lies in many ways upon white Americans who (disturbingly) seem to have checked out of the mayhem altogether. Too many of them say that they no longer listen to the news, they no longer pay attention and simply feel too helpless or numb to care. In the meantime, American institutions, American ideals of free speech and political freedom, American principles of procedural justice and separation of powers are all being gutted from the inside out. White Americans are privileged in their ability to zone out….for the rest of us each day is a new nightmare in the devolution of a country we can barely recognize anymore.