Graeme Wood: Don’t strip ISIS fighters of citizenship

Muthana’s case raises broad questions about the protections Americans enjoy under the law, and whether a certain class of immigrants has a higher burden of citizenship. By no means are these questions new: They have been debated since well before the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. But the potential return of hundreds of citizens who joined ISIS or went to live in its self-proclaimed caliphate is forcing Western governments to reexamine their citizenship laws—partly because they have few legal avenues to deal with those who are returning. (A similar case in Britain is prompting an analogous debate there.)

The New York Times notes that nearly all of the captured American men who went to fight for ISIS have been repatriated, but at least 13 American women and children have not—including Muthana, whose case is compounded by the fact that the Trump administration is denying the citizenship of someone the government had previously recognized as a citizen.*

The United States is among a small number of countries that offer what is known as birthright citizenship, and Charles Swift, Muthana’s lawyer and the director of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, contends that by virtue of her birth in New Jersey, Muthana is an American citizen. Stripping someone of U.S. citizenship is not uncommon: The government has “denaturalized,” or revoked the citizenship of, hundreds of former Nazis for lying on application forms about their political affiliations, as well as other people who have committed immigration fraud. What is different in Muthana’s case is that the government has, in effect, retroactively stripped her of recognition as a citizen.

"That should be incredibly terrifying," Swift told me. "If they can do this to Hoda, they can do it to anyone."

This is a striking demonstration of the U.S. government’s ability to determine citizenship and its rights. Immigrants have prized American citizenship because, among other things, it accords their U.S.-born children the same rights and opportunities as other native-born Americans. It also offers the protection of the rule of law that their home countries sometimes lack. Muthana’s case illustrates how illusory those protections could be.

This is hardly the first such case in recent years. Since the start of the War on Terror in 2001, civil-liberties groups have complained about government actions against Americans that appear to deprive them of their rights. President George W. Bush’s administration was criticized for holding José Padilla, an American citizen, as an enemy combatant for three and a half years without trial. President Barack Obama was condemned over the mass surveillance of citizens, and excoriated for the drone strike in 2011 that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical preacher. His teenage son, also an American citizen, was killed two weeks later in another strike.