The naturalization process is the way a person not born in the United States voluntarily becomes a U.S. citizen. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2015 there were nearly 20 million naturalized American citizens. Targeting these Americans for citizenship-stripping is an extraordinary measure with irrevocable consequences for individuals, families, and communities. Since the 1960s, it has largely been reserved for cases where citizenship was obtained by clear-cut fraud in extraordinary cases—for example, by concealing involvement in Nazi war crimes.

With its announcement, the Justice Department creates the impression that denaturalization will continue to be reserved for the most unsympathetic cases. The press release lists a handful of cases involving “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters” that are ostensibly representative of the targets of this new denaturalization effort. But they are not the only people at risk—and American history demonstrates the dangers of widespread denaturalization campaigns.

In 1906, Congress passed the Naturalization Act, giving the government the authority to revoke people’s citizenship; that authority expanded and evolved through subsequent laws and court decisions. Between 1907 and 1967, the federal government stripped more than 22,000 Americans of their citizenship. Some were targeted because of race and gender. In 1907, Congress passed a law revoking the citizenship of any American woman who married a foreign man. Some Indian Americans lost their citizenship following a 1923 Supreme Court ruling that Indians did not legally qualify as white, at a time when U.S. law restricted naturalization to “free white persons” or persons “of African descent.”

Americans also lost their citizenship on ideological grounds. One of the most infamous examples is the activist Emma Goldman. Goldman, who came to America in her teens, lost her citizenship in 1909 and was deported 10 years later, as part of series of law enforcement raids around the country against alleged “radicals” and leftists by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Thirty-three years later, amid Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which permitted citizenship-stripping and deportation for “subversive activities.”