A Quiet Revolution Inside the Citizenship Agency
The agency responsible for welcoming immigrants into American civic life has been quietly repurposed. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal body that processes visas, green cards, and naturalizations, has established a new internal unit called the Tactical Operations Division, according to an internal document reviewed by The New Yorker. The roughly 80-person division operates four distinct teams: one focused on denaturalization, one on refugee re-vetting, one on fraud detection and national security, and one dedicated to finding grounds for revoking legal permanent residency status.
The division is overseen by Danny Andrade, who was tapped to lead a newly opened USCIS field office in Nashville. Its creation was not announced publicly, and it represents a significant shift in how one of the government's most bureaucratically oriented agencies now allocates its resources — away from processing applications and toward enforcement and removal.
A Workforce in Decline, a Mission Expanding
The timing of the restructuring has drawn scrutiny from immigration policy experts. Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS policy analyst, noted on social media that the agency's workforce shrank by 11 percent last year and that its application backlog has nearly doubled compared to 2020 levels. Yet rather than directing resources toward clearing that backlog, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow has expanded enforcement capacity. The agency began hiring special agents authorized to make arrests in September of last year, following a new rule change, and its most recent job postings advertise for so-called "Homeland Defenders." Arrests of immigrants at USCIS field offices have also been reported in recent months.
Congress Enters the Debate With a Sweeping Ideological Test
On Capitol Hill, the conversation around denaturalization has taken on a sharper ideological edge. Texas Representative Chip Roy introduced the MAMDANI Act — formally titled the Measures Against Marxism's Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists Act — on Monday. The bill's name is a direct reference to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who was recently elected mayor of New York City.
The legislation would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow the federal government to deport, denaturalize, deny citizenship to, or bar entry of any non-citizen who is a member of — or advocates for — a socialist party, communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or an Islamic fundamentalist party. Its scope extends to Marxism as an ideology, and the bill defines "advocacy" broadly enough to include writing, distributing, printing, displaying, possessing, or publishing any written or electronic material in support of those ideas.
What the Bill Would Mean in Practice
Critics of the bill have focused on that word: possessing. Under the bill's language, a naturalized citizen or green card holder who owns a copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a history book covering socialist movements could theoretically meet the threshold for denaturalization or deportation. The word "affiliated" introduces a similarly expansive standard, potentially sweeping in individuals who have attended a lecture, donated to a cause, or signed a petition.
Supporers of the bill, including RedState commentators and Roy's own press office, frame the legislation as a necessary corrective to what they describe as the deliberate importation of ideologies hostile to American values. In a statement accompanying the bill's introduction, Roy argued that the immigration system had been used for decades to disadvantage American workers and spread what he called a "Red-Green Alliance" of Marxist and Islamist influence.
Why Denaturalization Is the New Frontier of Immigration Enforcement
Denaturalization — the legal process of stripping a person of naturalized citizenship — has historically been rare in the United States. Courts have treated naturalized citizenship as a protected status, and successful denaturalization cases have typically been limited to instances of documented fraud during the naturalization process, such as concealing a criminal record or lying about identity. What is happening in 2026 represents a qualitative shift: denaturalization is now being positioned not as an exceptional legal remedy but as a routine enforcement tool.
The USCIS restructuring reflects the operational side of this shift. By embedding a denaturalization team within a new Tactical Operations Division alongside fraud detection and LPR rescission units, the administration is institutionalizing the practice. The MAMDANI Act, if passed, would represent the legislative side: creating new ideological grounds for denaturalization that go far beyond documented fraud.
A Pattern With Historical Echoes
Legal scholars and civil liberties advocates have pointed to historical precedents when warning about the trajectory of these developments. The United States has previously used ideological criteria to exclude or remove immigrants — most notably during the Red Scare era of the late 1910s and again during McCarthyism in the 1950s. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 offer an even earlier parallel. In each case, the powers created to target specific groups were eventually applied more broadly.
The stakes in 2026 are compounded by the scale of the population potentially affected. Millions of naturalized American citizens were born abroad. If the legal standard for retaining citizenship is expanded — whether through administrative action at USCIS or through new legislation like the MAMDANI Act — the security of that status becomes contingent in ways it has not been for most of the nation's history.
A Shifting Definition of Belonging
Taken together, the USCIS restructuring and the MAMDANI Act signal a broader renegotiation of what American citizenship means and how permanently it can be held. For most of the twentieth century, naturalized citizenship was understood as a near-irrevocable status once legally obtained. The current policy environment suggests that consensus is eroding.
The administrative transformation of USCIS into a hybrid adjudication-and-enforcement agency — while its backlog balloons and its workforce contracts — raises practical questions about whether the agency can fulfill its original mandate at all. The legislative push to introduce ideological litmus tests for citizenship retention raises questions of a different, constitutional order. Both trends are accelerating simultaneously, and neither shows signs of slowing.
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