10 October, 2019

The Fragility of American Citizenship



Naturalized citizens are at particular risk of losing their citizenship under the Trump administration, as Baljinder Singh recently discovered. Singh has lived in the United States for nearly three decades, married a U.S. citizen, and became a naturalized citizen more than 10 years ago. Nonetheless, last year the government revoked his citizenship. Why? Because when he arrived in the United States as a teenager, the government recorded his first name as “Davinder” rather than “Baljinder”—quite possibly due to an interpreter’s error—and he never received the notice to appear in immigration court under that different name.