Immigrants who’ve worked for years to legally attain citizenship have had the rug pulled out from under them while others have been detained by ICE after attending their green card appointments
The executive director of a Massachusetts-based immigrant advocacy organization says that one of her clients arrived at her naturalization ceremony and was ready to raise her right hand and become a full American on paper when she was abruptly informed that she would not be taking the Oath of Allegiance that day – or possibly any time soon.
Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, tells WGBH that her client, a Haitian woman who has been a green card-holder for approximately two decades, is among immigrants who had been approved for U.S. citizenship but subsequently saw the final step of their naturalization process suddenly thrown into limbo. Why? It is the latest the Trump administration’s latest discriminatory travel ban, which includes Haiti and more than a dozen other nations.
Breslow said that her client had not been aware of the cancellation “because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time. She showed up as scheduled.” Other immigrants who had worked hard to pass naturalization exams, background checks, and interviews similarly had the rug pulled out from under them by the administration, she said. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers “were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
“People are devastated and they’re frightened. People were plucked out of line,” Breslow continued. Project Citizenship “said that this month alone, 21 clients have received notices about the cancellation of their oath ceremonies, the last step in the lengthy process of becoming a U.S. citizen,” The Daily Beast reported.
It’s a devastating reminder that the administration’s agenda was never about reforming our outdated immigration system. Rather, it is all about purging our long-settled immigrant neighbors and undermining legal immigration itself, a long-standing goal of mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller. This reprehensible targeting of immigrants who were just one step from attaining U.S. citizenship comes as the administration has also targeted immigrants who were following the rules by attending their green card interviews.
Just this week, dozens of community members protested outside a USCIS office in Salt Lake City after Jair Celis, who arrived in the U.S. legally and is married to a U.S. citizen, was detained by mass deportation agents due to an overstayed visa at what was supposed to be his final green card interview, FOX 13 reported. Attorney Andy Armstrong told the outlet that the USCIS officer “asked if just Jair could go back, and I went with him because I was his attorney. Instead of going into an interviewing room, we went into another room where there were two ICE agents.” He’s currently detained hundreds of miles away in Arizona.
“The arrest sparked outrage from Utah residents, with many standing outside the USCIS building for eight hours on Monday,” the report said. Meanwhile, Armstrong said he and Jair’s family are in disbelief over the unexpected detention.
“I immediately understood what was happening, but we haven’t seen that in Utah very much, and particularly, I have never seen that,” Armstrong said, noting that Jair “has no criminal history and doesn’t have an ineligibility to get a green card, and so I wasn’t going to the interview thinking that there was going to be any sort of a problem.” Jair’s wife, Lexi, “was quite distraught,” he added. “Obviously, that’s the last thing that in her mind she thought would happen.”
The loved ones of other immigrants who’ve been similarly detained are likely also in disbelief. The New York Times reports that in the San Diego area alone, “several dozen foreign-born spouses have been detained since Nov. 12, when the new tactic first surfaced, according to Andrew Nietor, an immigration lawyer.” Like Jair Celis, Thomas Bilger was looking forward to his green card interview and getting one step closer to becoming a full American. “Tom was super excited to become a U.S. resident,” his wife Audrey told The NY Times, “so much so that he had insisted on a cowboy-themed wedding.”
They also did everything asked of them: they hired a lawyer, gathered bank statements, leases, and other documentation proving their marriage was legitimate, and went to their appointment. “The officer asked routine questions,” The Times reported. “But the last one, according to Ms. Hestmark, was whether her husband had ever overstayed his visa. He responded truthfully and cited their lawyer’s assurance that this was a nonissue.”
“Suddenly, we were ambushed by three masked men in bulletproof vests with guns who told Tom they had a warrant for his arrest, that he is here unlawfully,” Audrey said. And like Jair Celis, Thomas is currently detained and separated from his family. “I’m a U.S. citizen,” Audrey said. “Tom is the love of my life, who happens to be born in Germany. We feel like we were tricked.”
ICE’s grip has been unsparing. Samuel Shasteen, a U.S. military veteran who did two tours of Afghanistan during his 20 years of service to our nation, was devastated when he lost his wife to cancer in 2022. But one day while picking up some coffee during a work break, he met Thai immigrant Chanidaphon Sopimpa and fell in love. “It kind of felt like there wasn’t a hole there no more,” Shasteen told NBC San Diego. “She just filled a spot, the void that was there.” But ICE took a sledgehammer to the couple’s newfound joy when ICE agents burst into Sopimpa’s green card interview and took her away, again citing an overstayed visa.“I kind of feel betrayed, to be honest,” Shasteen said. “We do everything that we can to protect and serve our country. And then they betray us by treating us like we’ve never done anything.”
It is essential to understand that tens of thousands of legal green card holders serve in our military today, defending America. Military service has always been a valuable mechanism for immigrants to gain U.S. citizenship, with more than 187,000 immigrants having become naturalized through military service since 2002. Using the same logic, if the administration can pull green card holders who have been approved for citizenship out of the citizenship line, it must hold that the administration will likely pull military members who hold green cards out of the frontline defending our nation.
It’s also not just a matter of canceling naturalization ceremonies, as columnist and America’s Voice advisor Maribel Hastings noted in her latest column. “Trump is already talking about revoking people’s citizenship, and on Friday, the creation of the USCIS Background Check Center was announced to review all pending and approved immigration adjustment requests.” Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles, told WBUR that while denaturalization doesn’t happen a lot, the federal government can still inflict a lot of damage even if the charges are bogus.
“It doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be an attempt to vastly increase this number of cases,” Arulanantham said. “And of course you can have a huge amount of harassment and abuse of people if you bring criminal charges or civil denaturalization charges against them, even if they don’t have a lot of merit and don’t ultimately result in someone losing their citizenship. The government can do a tremendous amount of damage to people by bringing cases that are extremely weak.”
Just look at the federal government’s entirely political cases against community members who have been protesting mass deportation, as well as the cases against immigrant contributors like Maryland dad Kilmar Ábrego García and international students like Rümeysa Öztürk.
“America used to celebrate citizenship. Now it is under assault,” responded America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “It used to be a moment of collective pride when an immigrant secured the necessary steps to earn US citizenship; to proudly take the oath celebrating their official recognition as Americans, with all the rights and responsibilities that conveys. In a vile departure from our own history, this administration is now undermining even that process and increasingly is targeting and ensnaring those ready and planning to become full U.S. citizens.”
