TRUMP WEAPONIZES THE BUREAUCRACY AGAINST NATURALIZED CITIZENS.

• Author: Dalmia, Shikha

PARVEZ MANZ00R KHAN, a 62-year-old Pakistani truck driver, has lived in the U.S. for nearly three decades. He has an American wife and three American children. In 2006, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. But Khan is facing "denaturalization" and deportation due to an error of omission on his application for citizenship.

Denaturalization--or stripping naturalized immigrants of their citizenship--is an extreme measure typically reserved for Nazis and terrorists. But in a little-noticed initiative called Operation Second Look, President Donald Trump is rummaging through past naturalization applications looking for reasons to remove the citizenship of nonheinous individuals.

In the early '90s, Khan filed an asylum petition under a different name but missed his asylum hearing. He says his lawyer failed to notify him. Unbeknownst to him, Khan told The Intercept, he was ordered deported in absentia in 1992. The Trump administration now wants to revoke Khan's U.S. citizenship and send him back to Pakistan, not because he poses any kind of a threat but because he failed to note on his citizenship application that he once applied for asylum and was rejected.

Operation Second Look builds on an Obama-era initiative titled Operation Janus, which kicked off in 2008 when immigration authorities discovered that 206 people from "special interest" countries who had been ordered deported later managed to obtain citizenship. Evidently, the government had failed to upload 315,000 files containing immigrants' fingerprints. As a result, it couldn't check naturalization...