Steve Vladeck, writing today in his One First newsletter:

There is no lawful way to "deport" U.S. citizens. And although citizenship can be revoked, any attempt by the government would run into significant statutory, constitutional, and practical obstacles.

That this is even a consideration is harrowing.

(It’s also necessary to affirm that “deport” is the wrong word when it comes to American citizens involuntarily removed from their country. It’s an illegal expulsion.)

But folks might be less familiar with the (narrow) legal avenues that are available to revoke U.S. citizenship: denaturalization (for those who became U.S. citizens at some point after their birth); and expatriation (for those who were “natural-born citizens”).

For good reasons, it is difficult to denaturalize a U.S. citizen and even harder to expatriate one. As this week’s “Long Read” documents, Congress has provided for only a handful of circumstances in which the executive branch is empowered to pursue such a move; and the Supreme Court has recognized meaningful constitutional limits (and an entitlement to meaningful judicial review) even in those cases. As we’re seeing so often with the current administration, there may well be a legal avenue for at least some of what it appears to want to accomplish, but that legal avenue has too much, you know, law, interposing both substantive limits and procedural requirements between the President and his policy preferences.

While it’s legally difficult to denaturalize and expatriate U.S. citizens, it’s not legally impossible. Vladeck lays out “seven classes of activities” through which we can lose our right to call ourselves American citizens. Most of them are “voluntary”—that is, an explicit choice to surrender citizenship, rather than having citizenship revoked.

It’s potentially easier to revoke naturalized citizenship, but the courts have placed significant constraints on this, too.

In other words, although denaturalization is potentially available in more cases than expatriation, it still requires meaningful, individualized judicial review—review that holds the government to a significant burden in providing that an individual wrongfully obtained their citizenship, and not just that they engaged in questionable behavior thereafter. There is, simply, no easy, fast path to revoking any American’s citizenship without their consent—and there hasn’t been for decades. That may not stop the current administration from trying it anyway, or from removing citizens unlawfully and then resisting the legal consequences. But it’s important to be clear on what the actual legal authority for such maneuvers would be. Here, there isn’t any.

It’s a small amount of comfort that there are significant legal barriers protecting American citizens from being involuntarily denaturalized or expatriated, but as we’ve seen too often in the first 100 days, the law so far has only slowed, but not stopped, the Trump regime.