France unveils mural throwing shade at America for July 4th

Sarah K. Burris
July 4, 2025 9:20AM ET
RAW STORY


"The Statue of Liberty's Silent Protest" mural in Roubaix, France by Judith de Leeuw (Photo: Screen capture via Instagram video)

The U.S. Independence Day holiday motivated a new mural in France that shames America.

While France was once a key ally in the Revolutionary War against Britain, it is now shaming the U.S. with a massive mural of Lady Liberty covering her eyes with mortification. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France after the U.S. Civil War, recalled the National Parks Service.

The mural is titled "The Statue of Liberty's Silent Protest" and was created by Dutch artist Judith de Leeuw. In an interview, Leeuw revealed to Storyful that it is meant to reflect shame for the United States over President Donald Trump's immigration policies, a USA Today video said.

A bronze plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty reads, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," from the sonnet "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus.

"With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand. A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame; Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name; Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command. The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame," it continues.

Her poem was meant to help raise money to construct the pedestal for the statue. Lazarus was involved in helping bring Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic pogroms from Eastern Europe to the U.S. at the time and she saw the Statue of Liberty as an inspiration for migrants fleeing to the welcoming arms of the United States.

In a post on Instagram, Leeuw explained that the Statue of Liberty was a "celebration of friendship, and given in the name of Independence Day — a day meant to honor the right to freedom for all."

"But today, that freedom feels out of reach. Not for everyone. Not for migrants. Not for those pushed to the margins, silenced, or unseen," she continued. "In Roubaix — a city with one of France’s largest migrant populations — I painted her covering her eyes, because the weight of the world has become too heavy to witness. What was once a shining symbol of liberty now carries the sorrow of lost meaning. The project was finished on July 4th — Independence Day. A quiet reminder of what freedom should be."

The mural took six days to complete and was unveiled the day before the United States' Independence Day. However, the artist called the unveiling on July 3, a "meaningful coincidence."

See the mural in the video from the artist below or at the link here.

This is fascism

Robert Reich
July 3, 2025




Trump’s 940-page Big Ugly Bill was passed today by the House and is now on the way to the White House for Trump’s signature.

It is a disgrace. It takes more than $1 trillion out of Medicaid — leaving about 12 million Americans without insurance by 2034 — and slashes Food Stamps, all to give a giant tax cut to wealthy Americans.

It establishes an anti-immigrant police state in America, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities that will transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government.

It will increase the already-bloated deficit by $3.4 trillion.

It’s also disgraceful because of how it came to be.

Trump was elected with only a plurality of American voters, not a majority. He eked out his win by a margin of only 1.5 percent.


His Big Ugly Bill squeaked by in the Senate by one vote, supplied by JD Vance, and by just two votes in the House. No Democrat in either chamber voted for it.

Polls show most Americans oppose it.

It was passed nevertheless — within an artificial deadline set by Trump — because of Trump’s total grip on the Republican Party.

Republican lawmakers feared that Trump would go after defectors with public attacks or endorsements of primary challengers.

They also feared withering blowback from conservative media, “MAGA” diehards, and Trump himself on social media.

After North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis announced his opposition to the bill, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER! He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”

Then Trump pledged to back a primary challenger to Tillis, and Tillis announced he would not seek re-election. Trump called that “good news,” and threatened primary challenges against other Republican fiscal conservatives standing in the way of the bill’s passage.

Other presidents in my lifetime have been able to summon majorities of lawmakers for unpopular causes — I think of Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — but none with the retributive threats, social media fury, and potentially violent base of supporters that Trump is now wielding.

Needless to say, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts made America more inclusive. Trump’s Big Ugly Bill makes America crueler.

The best analogy isn’t to Johnson. It’s to the “strongmen” of the 1930s — Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco.

That such a regressive, dangerous, gargantuan, and unpopular piece of legislation could get through Congress shows how far Trump has dragged America into modern fascism.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

We Didn't Fight a Revolution for a King



Why presidential power should worry every American.


Protestors march during an anti-Trump "No Kings Day" demonstration in a city that has been the focus of protests against President Donald Trump's immigration raids on June 14, 2025 in downtown Los Angeles, California.
(Photo: Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images)

Corey Saylor
Jul 04, 2025

Common Dreams

The Fourth of July marks the day America declared our independence from the idea that one man should hold unchecked power over an entire people and from a system that placed loyalty to the crown above fairness, above freedom, and above the law. That's the kind of government America's founding fathers risked their lives to overthrow.

Alexander Hamilton summed it up in Federalist No. 47, which most readers were required to read in high school, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." President Donald Trump does not wear a crown, but some of his unilateral, unconstitutional actions—past and planned—echo the exact abuses that America's founders opposed. And whether you support him or not, this should give you pause.

I say this as someone not looking to insult or belittle anyone's vote. Millions of Americans supported Trump in 2024 for valid reasons. Many voters simply felt he was the better of two flawed choices. But if you're one of those Americans—someone who voted for Trump but doesn't want to see one man hold all the power—this message is for you.

A system that allows one person to "do whatever I want" is only comforting if you always agree with that person.

The Founders didn't just oppose King George III because of taxes or trade. They rejected the very idea that one man should rule without real accountability. The Declaration of Independence laid out a vision of a republic in which power is limited, divided, and checked.

Our system was built with friction on purpose—three co-equal branches, independent agencies, freedom of the press, and state sovereignty—all to prevent the rise of a single ruler.

Donald Trump has stated that Article II of the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want as president."

Maybe you trust Trump with that power. Maybe you think he is using it wisely, or at least in your interests by abducting college students off of city streets because of their speech, cutting off federal funds to universities that refuse to cede academic freedom to the government, summarily stripping away birthright citizenship from children born in our nation, starting a war with another nation without any justification or congressional authorization, and funding a genocide in clear violation of U.S law. But what about the next president who runs with this precedent and goes even further? Or the one after that? A system that allows one person to "do whatever I want" is only comforting if you always agree with that person.

Many Americans, especially Republicans, have historically been skeptical of big government and concentrated power—and rightly so. Because when power gets centralized, it never stays in the hands of just one party.

Presidents of both parties have tested boundaries. But what President Trump proposes goes further: He's not testing the guardrails—he's removing them. And he's doing it while promising "retribution" and calling political opponents "enemies of the state."

The Declaration of Independence includes 27 grievances against King George III. Among them: obstructing justice, making judges dependent on his will alone, keeping standing armies under his personal command, manipulating elections, and using public offices as instruments of personal loyalty.

Read those carefully and reflect on the last few months.

As a Muslim, I'm also reminded that the warning against absolute authority isn't just a constitutional principle—it's a moral one. In Islam, power is a trust (amanah), not a privilege, and leaders are servants accountable to those they lead—and to God. Yusuf ben Ali, whose name appears in a revolutionary war era military muster role, is just one example of Muslims risking all for American ideals.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, "Every one of you is a shepherd, and every one of you is responsible for his flock." American Muslims know what it's like when government power turns its gaze on a single community—through surveillance, profiling, and fear-mongering. That's why we are especially sensitive to executive overreach. Because when power becomes personal, the Constitution becomes optional.

Too often, we treat criticism of a president as disloyalty. But that's not how the Founders saw it. They built a system where debate, dissent, and accountability were patriotic. Where allegiance is owed to the Constitution—not to a man.

We can and should insist on a system where no one—left or right—can ignore the law, silence opponents, or rig the system for personal gain.

The Founders gave us a framework strong enough to withstand kings, tyrants, and demagogues—but only if we choose to uphold it. We uphold it by not letting any president—Trump, Joe Biden, or the next one—rule without limits. And that's something every American—no matter who you voted for—should stand up and defend.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Corey Saylor is the research and advocacy director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.
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A Declaration of Independence From Trump’s Fascist America

Whenever any fascist regime of government becomes destructive to the future of humanity and the planet, it is the Responsibility of the People to drive it from power through nonviolent protest day after day.

Protesters carry a banner representing the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution in downtown Los Angeles during an anti-Trump "No Kings Day" demonstration in a city that has been the focus of protests against Trump's immigration raids on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Paul Street
Jul 04, 2025

Common Dreams


In Washington D.C., On This July 4th, 2025

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY,
WE DECLARE OUR INDEPENDENCE FROM TRUMP’S FASCIST AMERICA

Whenever any fascist regime of government becomes destructive to the future of humanity and the planet, it is the Responsibility of the People to drive it from power through nonviolent protest day after day until the regime is removed from power.

Donald Trump must go NOW because he and his regime are fascist. Fascism is a radically reactionary qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, virulent racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive “traditional values.” Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights.

The history of the Trump fascist regime is a history of repeated injuries, usurpations, and violence in the service of consolidating a fascist tyranny—assaulting truth, rule of law, the separation of powers and of church and state—while accelerating the climate catastrophe, endangering public health, and raising the risks of global war.

Let the facts be submitted.

To establish the rule of virulent white supremacy:

Trump has: re-exalted the slaveowners’ Confederacy; renamed U.S. military bases after Confederate “war heroes”; purged Black generals and racial diversity programs from the military; appointed white supremacists to key positions; racially whitewashed government websites and offices; made comments animalizing Black Haitian immigrants; removed Dr. Martin Luther King’ Jr.’s bust from the Oval Office; suggested that the nation’s first Black president face a “military tribunal”; assaulted the teaching and study of Black and Native American history; granted refugee status to white South African heirs of racist apartheid on the false claim that they are victims of “white genocide”; repeatedly spewed racist lies about people of color being unskilled and unqualified; and created a Supreme Court that ended anti-racist affirmative action in college admissions.

To cement the subjugation of women and erasure of LGBT people:

Trump has: bragged about being “the guy who ended” women’s fundamental right to abortion after his Supreme Court appointees reimposed the female enslavement of forced motherhood; repealed a government rule that requires medical providers to perform abortions required to save a pregnant woman’s life; threatened to use the archaic, 150-year-old Comstock Act to ban abortion in every state, with no exceptions; banned transgender care for minors; banned use of gender identity pronouns; stated that the gender identity on passports must match gender identity on birth certificates; and removed transgender service members from the military, making the false and dangerous claim that transgender troops cannot meet the military’s “high standards.”

To demonize whole peoples and threaten the world with “America First” xenophobia and imperialist aggression:

Trump has: unleashed militarized gendarmes to terrorize predominantly Latino immigrants with mass racially profiled kidnapping operations reminiscent of 1850s Fugitive Slave hunts from coast to coast; opened churches, schools, and immigration courts to his ferocious pursuit of brown-skinned immigrant bodies; attacked by executive fiat the core constitutional right of birthright citizenship, rendering stateless the children of undocumented immigrants born in this country; disappeared immigrants to torture prisons in El Salvador, with a green light from the Supreme Court to “deport” migrants to any third country or distant concentration camp; ordered the single largest de-legalization of human beings in U.S. history, stripping half a million Haitians, Cubans, and Venezuelans of their protected status overnight; illegally bombed Iran while threatening more “tragedy” to come; vowed to seize Greenland, threatened to annex Canada, deepened U.S. support for genocide in Gaza; and invoked “Manifest Destiny”, the 19th-century notion that America is divinely ordained to control all of North America.

And to establish a blatant dictatorship in which there is no rule of law and Trump is the law; where there is no due process, rights for the people, or recourse to redress the injustices of the regime; and political enemies are arrested, threatened, and suppressed:

Trump has: claimed that his reelection and second horrific administration are “God’s will” and refused to say whether he must honor the U.S. Constitution; waged a relentless war on truth, feeding his hate-filled base with one wild fascist lie after another; issued a barrage of illegal and unconstitutional executive orders; commanded the National Guard and the U.S. Marines to repress public protests of his mass deportation raids in Los Angeles, and threatened to arrest the governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles for voicing their opposition; made the Department of Justice a tool of retribution against his political enemies; blackmailed, bullied, and attacked the independence and integrity of leading law firms, universities, media corporations, and nonprofit organizations; defied federal court rulings; smeared and called for the impeachment of judges who rule against him; purged the military of leaders who might oppose his fascist moves; violated international law and the War Powers Act; and staged a military parade to announce the birth of a 21st-century fascist army loyal not to the rule of law, but to Trump personally.

A harsh historical truth made evident at great human cost in the previous century is that it is devastatingly difficult to dislodge fascists from power once they consolidate rule over state and society, as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and in Chile under Pinochet in the 1970s. If they are not separated from authority prior to the cementing of their reign, it can become too late.

No matter how they attain power, fascist rule is never legitimate. The responsibility to expel fascists from power is particularly urgent when fascism threatens to consolidate control atop history’s most powerful nation in a time of deepening global climate catastrophe and a world full of ever more lethal nuclear weapons.

Refuse Fascism, appealing to all who care about justice and decency, declares: IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA. TRUMP MUST GO NOW!

Please join Refuse Fascism in declaring and demonstrating independence from Trump’s Fascist America during four days of action in Washington D.C. July 1-4, 2025—details here: https://refusefascism.org/2025/06/25/come-to-d-c-july-1-4-four-days-of-historic-struggle/.

Hiltzik: With 'Alligator Alcatraz,' Trump and DeSantis define their immigration policy as a tragic farce

Michael Hiltzik
Thu, July 3, 2025 

The Department of Homeland Security posted this AI-generated image on X to celebrate the construction of Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" for the housing of immigration detainees. (Dept. of Homeland Security)More

Just as you may have thought that it was finally safe to think about American politics without thinking about Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he has slinked his way into the national news again.

The occasion was a tour he hosted Tuesday for Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of what has become known as "Alligator Alcatraz," a detention camp hastily erected in the Everglades to hold immigration detainees in tents and within chain-link cages.

(Environmental groups already have filed lawsuits about the camp's encroachment into the environmentally sensitive Everglades.)


Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.

Perdomo v. Noem

The day before the tour, DeSantis cackled over the conditions awaiting detainees in the camp located about 45 miles west of Miami amid swamps inhabited by pythons and alligators. “Good luck getting to civilization," he said. "So the security is amazing — natural and otherwise.”

Trump seconded that view during the tour: “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation,” he said.

DeSantis, whom Trump humiliated during their campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 as "Ron DeSanctimonious," basked in his apparent return to Trump's favor.

One could hardly put matters better than Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo, who described how DeSantis and Trump came together over their "shared passion: finding creative new ways to dehumanize immigrants, carried out with a trollish flair."


As it happens, the tour took place the day before immigrant advocates and several people swept up in immigration raids described in a federal court filing the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting the raids, as well as the atrocious conditions in which the detainees are held in an ICE facility in downtown Los Angeles.

Read more: Hiltzik: Thanks to the Trump slump, Florida and other states are moving to eviscerate child labor protections

That filing documents the continuum of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration nationwide.

In Florida, officials boast of the cruelty of holding detainees in a swamp before their immigration status is adjudicated — Noem stated that detainees would be offered forms to self-deport at the very entrance to the camp.

In California, "individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from," according to the filing. "If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody."

Then they're held in the "dungeon-like" L.A. facility, sometimes for days, and often "pressured into accepting voluntary departure."

A Homeland Security spokesperson called the assertions in the filing "disgusting and categorically false." The spokesperson told me by email, "Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false."

More on that in a moment. First, a quick review of how DeSantis, like other GOP politicians, has exploited immigration and other hot-button issues for political advantage.

On the national level, this began as a campaign against pandemic lockdowns and mask mandates — at one point while COVID was raging across his state, DeSantis publicly upbraided schoolchildren for wearing masks at a presentation, calling it "COVID theater." He progressed to questioning the safety of COVID vaccines and to trying to demonize Anthony Fauci, then the most respected public health official in the land.

The ultimate harvest was one of the worst rates of COVID deaths in the nation. DeSantis' defenders explained that this was because Florida has a high proportion of seniors, but couldn't explain why its rate was worse than other states with even higher proportions of elderly residents. He pursued attacks on LGBTQ+ people through an "anti-woke" campaign, though judges ruled against his efforts to legislate how teachers and professors did their jobs.

DeSantis tried to take his show on the road via a quest for the presidential nomination, but his culture warfare didn't obscure his maladroit skills on the stump. (I once described DeSantis as having "all the charisma of a linoleum floor," after which The Times received an indignant letter from a reader asserting that I owed linoleum an apology.)

Read more: Hiltzik: The only thing voters liked less than Ron DeSantis' anti-woke crusade was Ron DeSantis

But his policymaking has long ceased to be a laughing matter, especially when it comes to immigration.

In February, DeSantis signed a law making it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to enter the state of Florida. That law was blocked in April by federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami, who subsequently found state Atty. Gen. James Uthmeier in contempt for indicating to law enforcement officers that they didn't have to comply with her order.

The cruelty-for-cruelty's-sake nature of Trump's immigrant crackdown is vividly illustrated not only by his glee over the Everglades camp, but also the brutality of the ICE raids as depicted by the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles lawsuit.

The plaintiffs in the class action include five individuals (among them two U.S. citizens) who were detained in the raids, the United Farm Worker and three immigrant advocacy organizations.

Since early June, Southern California "has been under siege," the lawsuit asserts. "Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away."

The plaintiffs ascribe this behavior to a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day set by presidential aide Stephen Miller. "It is practically impossible to arrest 3,000 people per day without breaking the law flagrantly," Mohammad Tajsar of the ACLU of Southern California, which represents the plaintiffs, told me.

The lawsuit cites reporting by my colleague Rachel Uranga that, although the administration describes the raids' targets as "the worst of the worst," most of those nabbed had never been charged with a crime or had no criminal convictions.

Of the five individual plaintiffs, three were arrested at a bus stop while waiting to be picked up for a job, one — a U.S. citizen — at an Orange County car wash and one at an auto yard where he says he was manhandled by agents even after explaining that he is a U.S. citizen.

Read more: Hiltzik: Inside the Bakersfield raids that showed how Trump's immigration policies will sow chaos

The agents' refusal to identify themselves and give detainees the reason for their arrest violates legal regulations, the lawsuit states.

As the lawsuit describes the L.A. holding location, the basement of a federal building downtown, it's not designed for long-term detention. It lacks beds, showers and medical facilities. The detainees are held in rooms so overcrowded that they "cannot sit, let alone lie down, for hours at a time." Lawyers and families have often been prevented from seeing them the plaintiffs say.

A 2010 settlement of a previous lawsuit stipulated that detainees would not be held in the facility for more than 12 hours, and that they be permitted to meet with their lawyers for at least four hours a day seven days a week. Some detainees have been held there for days.

The settlement has since expired; the plaintiffs say "the unlawful conditions that led to the settlement more than a decade ago are recurring today."

Make no mistake: None of this is accidental or unavoidable. Trump's comments during his tour of the Everglades camp, and the actions of immigration agents in L.A. — many of which have been documented by onlookers' videos — make clear that sowing fear among people trying to go about their daily lives is high among the goals of what has become a theatrical anti-immigrant farce. It's no less tragic for that.

Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.


‘It’s fascism’: Critics slam Trump after tour of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Ryan Mancini
Thu, July 3, 2025 

President Donald Trump’s tour of a migrant detention center for undocumented migrants in the Florida Everglades on Tuesday, dubbed by the administration as “Alligator Alcatraz,” was slammed by critics as “fascism” and called the center a “concentration camp.”

Trump appeared with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while touring the detention center, featuring chain-linked fence cells with bunk beds.

The detention center was built for “up to 3,000 people with room for additional capacity,” Executive Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management Kevin Guthrie said Tuesday, according to CNN.

Funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program went towards the detention center’s construction, Noem said, according to FactCheck.org.

During his tour, Trump said that the center was intended for “bad people” to be deported, some of whom were born in the United States, he said.

“Many of them were born in our country,” Trump said during a press conference Tuesday. “I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that’ll be the next job that we’ll work on together.”

At one point during the tour, Trump said his predecessor wanted him in “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“[Former President Joe] Biden wanted me in here,” Trump said. “Didn’t work out that way but he wanted me in here, that son of a [expletive].”

Critics on air and online called out the detention center and Trump’s tour of it.

Human Rights Watch highlighted Trump’s tour and stated that the United States “is expanding a system already rife with inhumane conditions, neglect, and dehumanizing treatment.”

On the online show “Breaking Points,” investigative journalist and co-founder of Drop Site News Ryan Grim called the detention center a concentration camp and said, “it’s fascism.” On June 28 while on a family trip to Florida, Grim took video of a protest against the detention center.

Grim also noted that hurricane season has already begun and, if one were to hit Florida, could cause a “mass-casualty event” at the detention center.

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“Fascism, to bring a concentration camp to the Everglades, where the people are at immediate risk of getting killed if a hurricane comes through,” Grim said. “Say they never fill this camp? Let’s hope.”

In a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica resident Lorraine Knopf asked, “How did our country sink so low?”

“When I saw the picture of the metal bunks in tiers, my thought was ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’ not Alcatraz,” Knopf wrote. “I find this so horrific I cannot even find words for it. It is beyond disgusting.”

Designed To Enact Suffering

Post by DHS ghouls celebrating Alligator Alcatraz with, "Coming soon!"
Photo by Department of Homeland Security (sic)

Abby Zimet
Jul 02, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Plunging to new lows of "cartoonish cruelty" in our fascist reality show, MAGA just voted for our "most deeply immoral piece of legislation," depriving millions of food and health care as their fuehrer celebrated the launch of a scorched-swamp, mosquito-infested concentration camp - "Let's feed people to alligators!" - to detain millions more for overlooking the paperwork in their search for a better life. And there's merch! Fact: "Snakes in the Everglades got nothin' on the vermin in our government."

The Senate's barely-there approval - fuck Shady Vance - of Trump's heinous 900-page bill represents the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history along with the largest cut to Medicaid and food assistance, all in the obscene name of (partly) funding a $975 billion tax break for the already richest 1%. The bill, "a tipping point between normality and fascism," also pours over $170.7 billion into "a campaign of extermination against immigrants that evokes the greatest human rights atrocities of the past," funding the hiring of vastly more Nazi thugs to terrorize, humiliate and put in cages millions of brown people who do much of this country's work.

It will kick about 16 million people off health insurance by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, because who needs health insurance. It will throw millions of poor families, veterans, the elderly and disabled off SNAP by cutting $285 billion in food assistance, because who needs food. It will cut funding to rural hospitals, nursing homes, student loans, wind and solar energy - electric bills will soar 30% - costing millions of jobs and adding almost $4 trillion to the national debt, to be paid by our children and grandchildren, one of many excellent reasons it's said to be the most unpopular legislation since passage of the economically disastrous Embargo Act of 1807.

Bernie Sanders calls it, "The most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.” Decrying the GOP's "obsession" with stripping people of health care, Maine Sen. Angus King calls it "disgusting..I have never seen a bill this irresponsible, regressive and downright cruel." To longtime Sen. Chris Murphy, it's "the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said passage of a bill "cooked up in back rooms, cloaked in fake numbers (that) loots our country (for) the least deserving people you could imagine feels (like) a crime scene...When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”

The bill is so bad the GOP delayed cuts to Medicaid until after the mid-terms, and had to bribe its own members with perks to pass it; Alaska's Lisa Murkowski won the I Got Mine, Jack award by getting exemptions for her state and then complaining about how bad the bill is. To many, even worse than its craven kowtowing to oligarchs is its grotesque billions bestowed on a brutal, unprecedented white nationalist drive to dehumanize, criminalize and rip apart millions of families deemed undesirable by the color of their skin - and, eventually, likely their political persuasions - by making ICE, America's SS, the highest-funded law enforcement agency in a now-barbaric federal government.

The bill boosts the ranks of roaming Nazi henchmen by nearly 50%, with $8 billion slated to hire 10,000 more over five years (with signing bonuses!). ICE detention will get $45 billion more, a staggering 365% increase; "removal" gets $14.4 billion, a 500% surge; enforcement (see henchmen) almost $30 billion, up threefold, but we definitely can't afford to feed hungry kids. Billions more will build new camps, ramp up flights, double beds to 100,000, and round up more (hungry) terrified kids to meet a goal of 3,000 arrests a day. Of those, despite the absurd, enduring claim of targeting "the worst" violent criminals, maybe 8% have committed crimes; even ICE data shows over 93% are guiltless of anything but crossing the border.

The rabid stalking of migrants has given Republicans "license to be as openly racist as possible." Moving on from pet-eating Haitians, Scott Bessent sneered New York is turning into "Caracas on the Hudson"; on an image of its new mayor Zohran Mamdani eating with his hands, Texas' Brandon Gill, who's evidently never met a burger, sniped, "Civilized people in America don't eat like this - go back to the Third World"; and Trump already threatened to arrest "communist" Mamdani, blathering, "A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally." (Not.) Witless Tommy Tuberville called the residents of sanctuary cities "inner-city rats" we should "send back home"; Paul Krugman, home-grown but Jewish with a bi-racial wife: "We’re all rats now."

Thus do we have once-vibrant Hispanic communities from New York to L.A. now largely shut down, with frightened residents carrying passports to the corner store, keeping their kids inside until dark, or not venturing out at all for fear of abduction by masked gangs. Farmworkers across the country, up to 80% foreign-born and perhaps half undocumented, are also staying home: "If they show up to work, they don’t know if they will ever see their family again." In California, which grows much of our fruit and vegetables, those crops can go bad in one day as farmers struggle to harvest what they've grown. Experts say that many, already barely breaking even, will likely fold.

Meanwhile, ICE's daily atrocities - and the ensuing trauma - go on apace. A 75-year-old Cuban man here for 60 years died in custody, the 13th death this year; Tom Homan shrugged: "People die in ICE custody." Jacked-up stormtroopers assaulted workers at Home Depot and a woman selling tacos, tossing tear gas as they peeled away. They arrested the wrong mother of two as her kids tried to stop them. In Texas, they detained a preschool teacher with her three-year-old outside a courtroom. In L.A., they took a Honduran mother at a hearing with two children, one a six-year-old with leukemia; they've been held in Texas for weeks, the sick boy getting sicker, and she's filed the first lawsuit challenging the carnage.

And so, because it's still not enough cruelty for these ghouls, to Alligator Auschwitz, a steamy, "sadistic one-stop deportation shop" of tents filled with cages of bunk beds soon thronged with humans in a predator-replete swamp, a "concentration camp without the culpability of execution chambers" pitilessly "designed to enact suffering,” and help sick racists feel good about their whiteness. Set on a disused "shit-hole airstrip" in Florida's vast Everglades, the "bloodcurdlingly-monikered," built-in-8-days "Alligator Alcatraz” is surrounded by swampland brimming with alligators and Burmese pythons in a flood-prone, bug-plagued area where summer temps routinely top 100 degrees, rendering it "a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian."

Tents in an environmentally treasured nature preserve often hit by floods, tropical storms and hurricanes at a time the regime has decimated the agency that warns about those events, operated by a likewise-decimated FEMA and commanded by haphazardly- deputized, wildly ill-qualified members of the National Guard serving as "deportation judges" - what could possibly go wrong? Set to cost almost half a billion dollars a year - but no, we really can't afford to feed hungry children - the barbed-wire re-invention of World War ll Japanese Internment Camps, with a fresh touch of El Salvador's CECOT, evidently fulfills Republicans' most fervent wet dream: To feed immigrants to animals.

On Tuesday, touring this "beyond horrifying" showcase of ruthlessness - initial intake 1,000, ultimately 5,000 - the cartoon villains who created it proudly paraded in: Nazi Barbie, Stephen Goebbels, Ron DeFascist and Trump with a botched make-up line that made him look like The Joker. He delightedly handed the floor to "our superstar," the sociopathic Miller, who praised the use of "novel legal and diplomatic tools," along with building death camps and letting ICE goons rampage through terrorized communities, to "deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border," at least on the repulsive planet he inhabits, and we wish he'd go back to.

On her foul planet, replicating her photo-op before CECOT's shaved-head detainees in her illegal $50,000 Rolex, ICE Barbie is still somehow celebrating her imaginary "going after murderers and rapists and traffickers." Tuesday she even added an alleged cannibal they'd put on a plane home who "started to eat himself," arguing he was "the kind of deranged individuals on our streets (that) we're trying to get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don't belong here." Hmm. Ever hard-core, she's also busy menacing one patriot for a nifty ICE Block app: "This sure looks like obstruction of justice - if you obstruct our brave law enforcement, we will hunt you down."

Just before her visit, her "reptile-run Gestapo" shared an AI-generated Alligator Alcatraz image featuring smirking alligators in ICE caps; Noem giddily posted, "Coming soon!" Americans recoiled. "Have you ever wondered what it would have looked like if Hitler's SS had social media?" asked one. Many suggested putting the people who built the atrocity in it; others decried MAGA's dehumanized trolling about concentration camps: "History is repeating - just with better branding." One: "Posting memes that boast about the manner in which people will die if they try to escape the undoubtedly inhumane conditions that will become the norm in a facility (gives) major "Alligator Auschwitz" vibes."

The visit came exactly a year after SCOTUS declared Trump above the law. Standing before cages in a dumb Gulf of America cap, the eternal victim sneered "Biden wanted me in here, that son of a bitch," but "it didn't work out that way." He called Noem "elegant" and "an unbelievable horse person" (umm) before happily noting "they have a lot of cops in the form of alligators" to "keep people where they’re supposed to be." He praised his grotesque cohorts - “It’s really government working together, I'm proud of them" - made zigzag moves with his pudgy hands - "We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator" - and opined, "A little controversial, but I couldn’t care less.”


A dead-eyed, servile DeSantis outlined the task - "intake, process, then deport" - and hailed the camp about to hold human beings who did nothing wrong: "This is as secure as it gets." He added, “This is a model, but we need other states to step up." Meanwhile, his state's party of zombies is so into it they're selling depraved merch - t-shirts, drink cozies - for "Florida’s gator-guarded prison for illegal aliens...It's a one-way ticket to regret." One appalled observer: "That's some Idi Amin stuff right there." Much like Trump on Fox, extolling his latest grotesquerie and airily explaining on potential migrant escapes, "They'll just get eaten by wildlife. I guess that's the concept."

There's more. Amidst performative acts of political intimidation, he's mused, "We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time...many born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too" - maybe including Musk: "We'll have to take a look." He's selling $249 perfume, "a rallying cry in a bottle...They're all about winning, strength and success." He's musing about nationwide alligator-themed camps: "They might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time,” citing facilities to "handle (some) of the most vicious people on the planet." Observers: "Consider the Alligator Alcatraz gear on sale (before) deciding who are the most vicious people on the planet."

And he's losing what's left of his putrid mind. Asked about a timeline for detainees, he raved: "In Florida? I'm going to spend a lot. This is my home state. I love it." He "fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it - it's like a diamond," he has "a nice little cottage to stay at," he pays lots of fictional taxes, everyone in New York is leaving. "I'll be here as much as I can," he ended. "Very nice question." Lawrence O'Donnell on "the banality of their cruelty," the "utter emptiness of his mind," notably on the virtually ignored day USAID ends, with its expected millions of deaths, its "worldwide campaign of cruelty in their name." Others: "But her emails. I didn't like her laugh. Biden was too old." Now here we are: "A more loathsome fuck never walked the earth."

And on Wednesday, Alligator Alcatraz already began flooding.

'Dangerous and outrageous': Veterans erupt at Trump after he sends 200 Marines to Florida

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman

Carl Gibson

July 03, 2025 

ALTERNET

On Thursday, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) — which oversees U.S. military operations in North America – announced that it would be deploying approximately 200 U.S. Marines to Florida and other states to assist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. Multiple military veterans are now sounding the alarm.

According to USNORTHCOM's official statement, the Marines will be sent from the Marine Wing Support Squadron 272, Marine Corps Air Station in New River, North Carolina. In addition to Florida, USNORTHCOM indicated that Marines would also be headed to Louisiana and Texas. The Marines are reportedly only going to "perform strictly non-law enforcement duties within ICE facilities." The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 explicitly prohibits the U.S. military from being used for civilian law enforcement activity.

"Their roles will focus on administrative and logistical tasks, and they are specifically prohibited from direct contact with individuals in ICE custody or involvement in any aspect of the custody chain," the statement read.

The news of Marines assisting immigration officials within U.S. borders provoked condemnation from several prominent military veterans on social media. Former Ukrainian Armed Forces veteran John Jackson said the use of the military within U.S. borders suggested that President Donald Trump's administration was "trending in such a bad direction." Army combat veteran and podcaster Fred Wellman called the deployment "incredibly dangerous and outrageous."

"Combat Marines do not belong anywhere in the United States supporting ICE," Wellman wrote on X. "This is not their mission."

Army National Guard veteran Chris Purdy of the Chamberlain Network — an advocacy group led by military veterans — also condemned the use of military personnel to assist with immigration-related operations on American soil. Purdy insisted that in a democracy, the military "defends the nation" and "doesn't police its people."

"The [National] Guard is especially vulnerable here, because the Guard is different, because they live in communities they're being asked to patrol now," he said. "They're going to see the same families at the grocery store, at the kids' soccer game and church. Members of the Guard, they have library cards. And when they're patrolling their own communities for political partisan purposes, that crosses a line that we should never ask them to do."

AlterNet reached out to USNORTHCOM by phone for comment.

Can Trump Deport U.S. Citizens Like Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani?

Chad de Guzman
Fri, July 4, 2025 

TIME

LONG READ

Donald Trump promised mass deportation, campaigning against undocumented immigrants as a scapegoat for Americans’ economic woes, crime concerns, and more. But since taking office, the President has expressed openness to deporting not just undocumented immigrants but U.S. citizens too.

When asked earlier this week whether he’d deport his former advisor, tech billionaire Elon Musk, amid Musk’s criticisms of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump said “we’ll have to take a look.” Musk, who was born in South Africa, became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Later the same day, Trump called the citizenship status of New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into question, asserting: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything.” Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, became a U.S. citizen in 2018.

Trump also threatened to arrest Mamdani if he interfered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions, to which Mamdani responded in a statement: “The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city.”

The Trump Administration has already pursued policies that strip migrants, including international students and humanitarian parolees, of their visas and legal statuses to be in the country, and it has reportedly deported several U.S.-born children along with their foreign-born parents as it seeks to redefine birthright citizenship.

The President has also repeatedly suggested that U.S. citizens who are convicted of violent crimes should be deported to foreign prisons.

“We’ll have to find that out legally. I’m just saying if we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I don’t know if we do or not, we’re looking at that right now.”

Legal experts have said that deporting U.S. citizens for any reason is unconstitutional, but the Trump Administration appears to be circumventing that restriction by pushing to strip citizenship from certain people, through a process known as denaturalization. While denaturalization can only apply to naturalized citizens, that group is estimated to number more than 25 million, or more than 7% of the U.S. population.

Here’s what to know.

The history of denaturalization

Denaturalization has a long and complex history in the United States.

Patrick Weil, a historian and director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and visiting professor of law at Yale University, wrote a book on it in 2012 called The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic.

In it, Weil argues that the institution and evolution of denaturalization “made a quiet yet major contribution to the transformation of contemporary American citizenship.”

Through changes in law and Supreme Court rulings, denaturalization went from a process that was broadly used to make the citizenship of foreign-born Americans conditional on their behavior to a rare practice that, because of its high threshold, Weil argues, reifies the near inviolability of U.S. citizenship, naturalized or otherwise.

While Weil outlines a number of laws, court cases, and executive-branch actions that shaped denaturalization over the years, the three main turning points came in 1906, 1940, and 1967.
When the Naturalization Act of 1906 was passed to try to federalize naturalization processes, it included a provision on denaturalization that Weil writes “was originally and primarily conceived as a means of redressing naturalization fraud and illegality committed prior to or during the naturalization process itself—before the moment an alien obtained American citizenship.” In reality, however, in the following decades, most denaturalizations “occurred out of a desire to expel from the body politic ‘un-American’ citizens: most of them not for fraud or illegality committed before they were naturalized, but because of who they were or what they had done after they obtained American citizenship.”

“Denaturalization became a means for cleansing the American body politic of those naturalized citizens who behaved in ways considered un-American, due to their attachment to a ‘foreign’ morality or to their race, land of origin, or political ideas—sometimes before their naturalization, but, most often, developed afterward,” Weil writes. It became “a tool for ridding the American citizenry of ‘undesirables.’”

“If a naturalized citizen was Asian, spoke out against war, was a Socialist, a Communist, or a fascist, or lived abroad, she risked the loss of her American citizenship,” Weil writes, though he noted that: “from 1906 until the end of the 1930s, denaturalizations for political or racial reasons numbered fewer than one hundred. The majority of cases continued to revolve—at a pace of hundreds some years—around foreign-born Americans residing abroad.”

During World War II, denaturalization “became an integral part of a proactive program by the Justice Department to bolster national security against threats from America’s ‘enemies.’”

But “foreign-born Americans were not the only ones at risk,” Weil explained. “When denaturalization became a central part of the government’s national security policy during World War II, the 1940 Nationality Act also expanded the number of American-born citizens subject to automatic loss of citizenship.” Before, only American-born citizens who acquired a foreign citizenship could be subject to denationalization, but the 1940 law “extended the denationalization power to include those Americans who had evaded the draft, joined a foreign army, or participated in foreign elections.”

That’s when “the Supreme Court intervened and began to reduce the scope of the federal government’s denaturalization authority.” Weil writes: “Before the outbreak of war, the Supreme Court had backed the authority of the executive to pursue the denaturalization of new Americans for failing to adhere to a myriad of legal minutiae, from the form of naturalization applications, to the duration of U.S. residence, to the age of their arrival in the United States.” But over the next three decades, it would take up a number of cases relating to denaturalization and denationalization.

“About half of the Court, depending on the particulars of a given case, continued to uphold the authority of Congress to deprive naturalized and native Americans alike of their citizenship. As the basis for its decisions, the Court asserted judicial restraint and the exclusive authority of the elected branches over foreign affairs. The other half of the Court, however, invoked a number of constitutional rights in support of striking down and restricting laws permitting denaturalization and expatriation. Denaturalization had provoked a fierce debate on the Supreme Court between these two factions,” Weil summarizes. “Although intensely divided, the Court progressively reduced the scope of the federal government’s authority to revoke American citizenship. It did so, in part, by upholding free speech and procedural guarantees for foreign-born Americans.”

The most significant ruling came in 1967 when Justice Hugo Black outlined in Afroyim v. Rusk, according to Weil, “an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that secured for all—native-born and naturalized—the full set of privileges entailed in American citizenship. American citizenship was no longer a contingent benefit conferred by a sovereign state in exchange for its citizens’ respect for the laws.”

In the ruling, Black wrote: “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.”

Although denaturalization was sharply restricted from that point onward, Weil notes that “a nearly unanimous Court permitted—and still permits, in narrow circumstances—a naturalized citizen to lose her American citizenship.”
The limited criteria for denaturalization

There were around 22,000 denaturalizations in the U.S. before 1967, according to Weil. By the time his book was published in 2012, he said there had been only 150 since, though the Department of Justice would later tell news outlets that there were 305 cases between 1990 and 2017.

“Although its use has been substantially reduced,” Weil wrote, “since 1967 denaturalization is still available on two basic grounds. The first of these grounds applies to individuals who have committed gross violations of human rights.” This primarily focused on naturalized Americans with undisclosed Nazi pasts. “In contrast to judicial skepticism of expatriation in the 1960s and 1970s, courts have not challenged the authority of the government to denaturalize individuals responsible for committing human rights violations,” he adds.

“The second modern ground for denaturalization is for fraud or misrepresentation committed during the naturalization process,” Weil writes.

A 2020 advisory by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center explains that “a naturalized U.S. citizen can have that status taken away if the federal government proves by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence in a civil federal court proceeding, or satisfies the beyond a reasonable doubt standard in a comparable criminal case, that the citizen was not qualified for naturalization at the time it was mistakenly granted.”

A naturalized citizen can also be denaturalized, the ILRC says, for “refusing under specified circumstances to testify before a congressional committee on alleged subversive activities,” under a Cold War-era law that remains valid, or for failing to meet the requirements if they were naturalized under the wartime-military-service path to citizenship.

While a criminal revocation of naturalization on the basis of naturalization fraud requires, like in all criminal cases, the government to meet a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt burden-of-proof conviction, civil denaturalization proceedings require the government simply to convince a federal court, in which the defendant may not even be provided with an attorney, that a naturalization was “illegally procured” or “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”

Illegal procurement, according to the ILRC, refers to someone who was ineligible for naturalization but received it anyway and doesn’t require proof of concealment or misrepresentation, though the organization notes that it is largely a distinction without a difference as “procuring naturalization by concealment or willful misrepresentation is also procuring it illegally.”

The eligibility conditions that one can be accused of violating include: a) lawful permanent resident status for five years (or three if married to a U.S. citizen); b) continuous residence in the U.S. for that five- or three-year period; c) physical presence in the U.S. for at least half of that five- or three-year period; d) good moral character; and e) that the person was “ “attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States” during that five- or three-year period.

The last two conditions are the most broad and open to interpretation. “Many of the cases for denaturalization based on lack of good moral character involve individuals who have committed crimes prior to naturalization, but were not arrested or charged until sometime after naturalization, and they did not disclose the existence of these crimes during the naturalization application process,” the ILRC writes. Similarly, if within five years after naturalization, someone “ joins or becomes affiliated with an organization that would have precluded naturalization,” such as a terrorist group, they can be presumed to have been “not attached to the principles of the Constitution” and “not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the U.S. at the time of naturalization,” and thus denaturalized.

Denaturalization under Trump

Former President Barack Obama ramped up denaturalization efforts with a Department of Homeland Security program called Operation Janus, mined data, including fingerprint records, to identify people who obtained citizenship through false pretenses.

But the first Operation Janus denaturalization didn’t occur until January 2018, when Trump was in office. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also announced plans around the same time to refer some 1,600 cases to the Justice Department to prosecute, and in its fiscal year 2019 budget, the Department of Homeland Security redirected funds from USCIS to ICE for investigations into naturalized citizens.

Trump’s first-term administration took denaturalization efforts “to new levels,” Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, wrote in 2019. A factsheet by the Open Justice Initiative said the number of denaturalization cases filed annually under Trump nearly doubled that of Obama.

In 2020, the Justice Department also established in its immigration office a Denaturalization Section “dedicated to investigating and litigating revocation of naturalization,” ostensibly focusing on “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization.”

“Despite the significant resources this administration is expending on these cases,” the ILRC noted in its 2020 advisory, “in absolute terms the number of people who have had their citizenship stripped remains small so far. However, there are fears that the creation of the DOJ’s Denaturalization Section may result in many more people being denaturalized in the near future. In addition, these efforts will have a chilling effect on the number of legal permanent residents applying for U.S. citizenship and will further burden a system that is already delayed in adjudicating and granting immigration benefits.”

In 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to review denaturalization and passport revocation practices, “to ensure that these authorities are not used excessively or inappropriately.”

But since taking office again, Trump has made denaturalization a priority again.

A June 11 Justice Department memo published online issued guidance to the Civil Division, the largest litigating body of the department, on its priority initiatives, which included the revocation of citizenships.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who leads the division, said in the guidance that the division “shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.”

“The benefits of civil denaturalization,” said Shumate, “include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport.”

Among the cases Shumate ordered prioritizing are cases on those who pose a potential threat to national security, including those with links to terrorism, espionage, or unlawful export from the U.S. of sensitive goods, technology, or information; and those who commit certain kinds of fraud.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers criticized how the directive calls for denaturalization via civil proceedings, which the advocacy lamented carry “a lower burden of proof” and “do not require the government to provide the accused with an attorney.” It also criticized the memo’s “broad scope and vague language.”

“The Trump Administration’s push to revoke citizenship is alarming, and raises serious Fourteenth Amendment concerns,” said NACDL President Christopher Wellborn. “The use of civil litigation to evade Sixth Amendment obligations demonstrates contempt for the right to counsel. And although the memo purports to target concealment of earlier offenses, the language suggests that any offense, at any time, may be used to justify denaturalization.”

When it comes to Musk and Mamdani, however, legal experts have said denaturalization proceedings are unlikely. “Denaturalisation is limited to cases where the government can prove material fraud in their original applications,” Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, told Al Jazeera. Trump’s talk of deporting the two, Kagan says, “appears to be irresponsible rhetoric designed to intimidate political opponents.”

Musk has previously denied accusations of working in the country illegally before he became a citizen.

Mamdani has been accused by members of Congress of sympathizing with terrorists. But while former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was recently appointed to a Homeland Security advisory council, expressed support for calls to denaturalize and deport him—“I think that is very responsible request and something the government should do given the nature of the things that he says,” Giuliani said last week, calling Mamdani a “traitor”—he caveated: “I don’t know that we can come to the conclusion and convict him of it, but he raises a real legitimate concern that he is not a loyal American.”

As Weil noted in his history of denaturalization, the Supreme Court has affirmed that being “a loyal American” is no longer a condition for U.S. citizenship. But as the history of denaturalization has also shown, the Supreme Court can change its mind. And this Supreme Court has already been observed to show “astounding” deference to Trump.

Still, even if the Trump Administration were to denaturalize Mamdani, which would preclude him from taking office, that wouldn’t necessarily mean it could kick him from the country. Denaturalized citizens do not automatically get deported; rather they are reverted to their last immigration status as a noncitizen—which in Mamdani’s case was a green card holder, or lawful permanent resident.

Anti-Trump Protests Erupt Across United States on Fourth of July: See the Most Dramatic Photos

The country's 249th anniversary was marked by nationwide demonstrations, just weeks after massive "No Kings" protests overshadowed Trump's birthday military parade

Rachel Raposas
Fri, July 4, 2025 

PEOPLE


Stephanie Keith/GettyActivists protest President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025


NEED TO KNOW

Protesters gathered across the United States to rally against President Donald Trump and his administration's policies on Friday, July 4

The demonstrations on the country's 249th birthday came less than one month after massive nationwide "No Kings" protests similarly expressed discontent with the Trump administration

Activists were seen dressed in Marvel costumes, holding hand-painted signs and balloons to demonstrate against the president and his political agenda


Citizens across the United States are marking the country's 249th birthday with protests against the Trump administration.


On Friday, July 4, scores of protesters took to the streets to rally against President Donald Trump's policies established since his return to office in January, including ICE immigration raids and deportation, the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites and overall perceived abuse of federal power.

The timing also aligns with Trump signing his landmark "Big, Beautiful Bill," which includes cuts to popular programs like Medicaid and SNAP and reallocates money for Trump's most controversial programs, including making Immigration and Customs Enforcement better-funded than every other federal law enforcement agency and most countries' entire militaries.

The protests on Independence Day come less than a month after the massive "No Kings" protests held on June 14 — Trump's 79th birthday, during which he hosted a military parade in Washington — that similarly voiced disdain for Trump's policies, especially regarding mass deportation.

See some of the most dramatic photos from the July 4th protests, taken across the nation.

Washington, D.C.

DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via GettySteve Rogers, a history teacher from Arizona, dresses as Captain America to protest Donald Trump at the White HouseMore
Washington, D.C.



DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via GettyPeople in Washington, D.C. carry signs protesting President Donald Trump
Los Angeles



ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via GettyA protestor holds a Trump balloon in Los Angeles
Los Angeles



ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via GettyProtestors hold signs in Los Angeles on July 4, 2025

Los Angeles

ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via GettyProtestors dress up in costumes during a Los Angeles protest

Los Angeles



ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via GettyA protestor carries a sign during a Los Angeles demonstration

New York City

Stephanie Keith/GettyProtestors lay down with signs in New York City

New York City

Stephanie Keith/GettyA protestor holds up signs outside of Trump Tower
New York City