Rep. Chip Roy of Texas introduced legislation Monday that would authorize the federal government to strip naturalized American citizens of their citizenship and deport them based on their political and religious beliefs, a measure civil rights groups and legal scholars say resurrects the darkest chapters of American political repression.
The Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists Act — the MAMDANI Act — would bar entry to the U.S., deny citizenship to and deport any immigrant who is a member of or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism or Islamic fundamentalism.
The bill, named for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and Muslim immigrant, would also allow the government to review and revoke the citizenship of any naturalized American found to have expressed support for such ideologies, including by simply possessing written materials.
Roy’s proposed law would block judicial review of these draconian decisions, making autocratic agency rulings final and unreviewable by any court.
“Why do we continue to import people who hate us?” said Roy. “Our immigration system has been cynically used to disadvantage American workers’ competitiveness in favor of mass-importing the third world.”
The bill’s elimination of judicial oversight drew immediate condemnation.
Under its provisions, a decision by immigration authorities could not be challenged in any federal court — no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeal.
“That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state,” observed New Jersey Democrat Lisa McCormick, who called the idea “a cowardly throwback to bad ideas of America’s darkest moments.”
She said Roy’s measure echoes the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered the roundup of thousands of immigrants without warrants, detaining them for months and deporting 556 for “merely holding the same political beliefs espoused by Mark Twain and Helen Keller.”
Twain, an anti-imperialist who said, “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land,” believed the nation’s real oppressors were “the few: the king, the capitalist and a handful of other overseers and superintendents.”
Keller, the famed disability advocate who proudly displayed a red flag in her study, wrote that “to me Socialism is the ideal cause.”
It also recalls the McCarthy era, when the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts ruined thousands of lives based on alleged communist sympathies — a period the Senate formally condemned as un-American conduct.
In his famous 1954 broadcast that helped turn the tide against McCarthy, Edward R. Murrow declared: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, a relentless critic of such tactics, called the House Un-American Activities Committee “better for a police state than for the USA.”
“Representative Roy’s un-American and unconstitutional publicity stunt masquerading as a bill endangers the American Muslim community and misrepresents the Islamic faith,” said Sameeha Rizvi of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Texas chapter. “It stokes fear and prejudice instead of promoting understanding or security.”
The Supreme Court has long held that American citizenship cannot be stripped for political beliefs, speech or protected associations. Legal experts note that denaturalization is a rare measure reserved for cases involving clear fraud in the naturalization process, not constitutionally protected expression.
Ravi Mangla, press secretary for the Working Families Party, said the bill’s forced acronym appeared designed solely to target Mamdani. “Blatant Islamophobia aside, Roy’s staff probably wasted days trying to land this acronym,” Mangla said.
Roy was among the House Republicans who aggressively worked to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In the weeks following that election, Roy texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend” — a demand for evidence to support baseless fraud claims. On Jan. 1, 2021, as the effort to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory intensified, Roy texted Meadows, “We’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.”
Roy later voted against objecting to the Electoral College certification, but his private encouragement of the effort to overturn the election has been extensively documented in texts obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The MAMDANI Act would put every naturalized citizen and legal permanent resident on notice that their continued presence in the United States depends on adherence to government-approved political orthodoxy. It would criminalize the possession of books by socialist thinkers and the act of attending a labor union meeting or a tenants’ rights rally.
“The First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class,” one rights advocate noted. “History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe or advocate, that power never stays trained just on the original targets.”
Some 25 million naturalized citizens and nearly 13 million green-card holders live in the United States today. Under Roy’s bill, every single one would be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on a complaint to federal authorities.
The Nazi regime’s 1935 Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews and political opponents of their German citizenship, reducing them to mere “state subjects” without rights.
The 1933 Denaturalization Law revoked citizenship from naturalized immigrants deemed “undesirable,” and the 1941 decree automatically stripped exiled Jews of citizenship before confiscating their property.
“Rep. Chip Roy’s MAMDANI Act follows the same legal blueprint: it would allow the government to review, revoke and deport naturalized American citizens based solely on their political and religious beliefs — socialism, communism, Islamic fundamentalism — with no judicial review,” said McCormick. “What the Nazis did to Jews and communists, Roy proposes to do to American citizens who are Muslims or progressive Democrats. The machinery differs; the logic does not.”
The bill has no co-sponsors as of Tuesday afternoon. Roy’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation’s constitutionality or its elimination of judicial review.
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