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The Trump administration’s plan to strip automatic citizenship from children born abroad to some military service members and other federal employees is “abhorrent” and “deeply offensive,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth said in a letter urging the acting homeland security secretary and the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to “immediately rescind its harmful update to the USCIS policy manual.”
The move “represents the worst type of policy: it is confusing, cynical, unnecessary and unfair,” Duckworth wrote. “Worst of all, this policy update harms our national interest and disrespects the service of certain U.S. service members and civil servants.”
Duckworth points out that applying for citizenship for these children who have previously had automatic citizenship will cost their families $1,170—not a small amount for many families—and force them “to jump through bureaucratic hoops to ‘prove’ their children are worthy of citizenship,” something she describes (correctly) as “disgusting and disgraceful.”
With this policy, as with so many things the Trump administration does, the cruelty (the abhorrent, deeply offensive, disrespectful, disgusting, disgraceful cruelty) is the point. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan and acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli are probably as likely to jerk off to this description of their plan as they are to change it. But Duckworth sure left no room to misinterpret or soften her assessment of what this will do.