Here's a bit of dark poetry: just as Alan Dershowitz suggests his banishment from Martha's Vineyard social circles is "McCarthyism," the Trump regime breaks out a weapon last put to use in the Red Scare. That's at least according to Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai, who joined NPR's Ailsa Chang to put the administration's new denaturalization task force in context:

CHANG: Naturalization ceremonies carry with them a sense of permanence. They signify an end to an often long immigration process. But last month, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services started a task force to review cases where people may have lied in order to get citizenship. And now the administration says it could be denaturalizing potentially a few thousand people ... Is what the Trump administration doing here new? I mean, is there historical precedent for devoting resources like this to trying to detect citizenship fraud?

NGAI: The last time the federal government tried to denaturalize citizens was during the McCarthy period. And they went after people who they were accusing of being Communists who were naturalized citizens. And they took away their citizenship and deported them. It wasn't that many people because, actually, it's not that easy to do. But that was the last time that there was a concerted effort. So it's been...

CHANG: Wow.

NGAI: ...Almost 75 years...

CHANG: Wow.

NGAI: ...Since the government has tried to do it. And I think most people would say that the Red Scare, or the McCarthy period, was not the nation's proudest moment.

Indeed! The Red Scare is actually on the Not The Nation's Proudest Moment bingo card, alongside, say, Japanese internment. Someone will be shouting BINGO! any day now.

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Essentially, while the government has always investigated when someone comes forward with a charge against a naturalized American citizen, this is the first time since Joe McCarthy we have a dedicated task force to try to ferret people out. As Jamelle Bouie put it very neatly in Slate, this is simply the latest attempt on the part of Republicans—before and, with a turbo charge, under this president—to prevent the browning of America, or at least the American electorate.

But perhaps the most immediately pressing issue is that this administration cannot be trusted to restrict the task force's operations to investigating people who allegedly lied during the naturalization process. Trump's White House has displayed a generalized hostility to immigration best summed up in its proposal to cut legal immigration in half. At the border, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sought to criminalize asylum-seekers—who are pursuing a human right under international law and treaties to which the United States is a signatory—by preventing them from presenting themselves at official checkpoints and restricting the criteria for seeking asylum.

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And most precisely, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a pattern of arresting people without warrants, denying them due process, and even accusing people of having gang affiliations without evidence in order to detain them. Clearly, this is not an administration whose respect for individual rights or domestic and international law outweighs its desire to remove Certain People from the country. It would be foolish to believe that will change once they start trying to strip people of citizenship.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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