I appeared on July 1, 2025, on I’m Right with Jesse Kelly. It’s always good to appear on Jesse’s show.
The main topic was the recent Supreme Court “birthright citizenship” (aka “universal injunction”) case, and what it meant for the lawfare onslaught against the Trump administration.
We also talked as some length about how ACB took KBJ to the woodshed with the full blessing of five other Justices.
But my favorite part was near the end, when I got to revisit the Rasmea Odeh immigration fraud and denaturalization case, about which I wrote extensively starting about a decade ago.
The current context was Trump administration indications that it would be looking to denaturalize citizens who obtained citizenship by fraud. Per Axios:
The DOJ directed attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases where naturalized citizens commit crimes, per the memo.
- A DOJ spokesperson told Axios that “denaturalization proceedings will only be pursued as permitted by law and supported by evidence against individuals who illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process.”
- “Those who gain citizenship through unlawful means and endanger our national security will not maintain the benefits of being an American citizen,” the statement said.
My mind immediately went “there” though my words did not, as Jesse laughingly noted:
Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity:
Kelly: Alright, let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart and from what I understand near and dear to yours, denaturalization. This is not something that’s been tossed around a lot. The GOP’s been real shy about things like that and wanting to kind of play nice, but the DOJ indicates they’re gonna start looking at it, explain what it is, why, where are we going from here?WAJ: Sure. Well, if you have been naturalized as a citizen, so you’re not born here, and you go through the immigration process and the naturalization process, if at any point along that line you make material misrepresentations, you forget to disclose, not forget, you don’t disclose things, you intentionally don’t disclose things or you lie on your applications, the government can move to rescind your naturalization, to strip you of your citizenship.I covered at my website, about a decade ago, a very famous case involving a Palestinian terrorist named Rasmea Odeh. She came to the United States. She lied on her visa application about her terrorist connections. She lied on her naturalization application about it. She denied having any connections, but she did. And many years later, I think it was 15 years later, the FBI picked up on it and they filed criminal charges against her to strip her of her citizenship.And that is what eventually happened. She lost the first trial, she got a retrial, and right before the second trial, she consented to leave the country and she was stripped of her citizenship.So if there is a person here who lied on their immigration papers and their naturalization papers, for example, maybe they misrepresented their family connections. Maybe they committed marriage fraud to become a citizen. I’m not talking about anybody in particular, but, there have been allegations against a congresswoman about that. If it is substantiated, if somebody lied to get into the United States and gets citizenship, the government absolutely has a mechanism to strip them of that.And the Department of Justice, again, I don’t know if they have a particular person in mind, but the Department of Justice has said they’re going start looking into that for people who have obtained citizenship and to challenge it. So it absolutely is a procedure. It has been used in the past and it can be used in the present.Kelly: I just wanna make sure I’m being crystal clear with everybody that the professor was not discussing Ilhan Omar, who lied and married her brother to get into the country. He never mentioned that name at all. I just wanna make sure he never mentioned Ilhan Omar. Thank you so much, professor. I appreciate you.
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