The Trump administration’s despicable attempt to block immigrant U.S. military service members from an expedited path to citizenship was handed a well-deserved court defeat this week thanks to a class-action lawsuit launched by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two affiliates on behalf of eight noncitizen U.S. military service members, including a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient.
“As a result of the Trump administration policy, non-citizen service members have been denied the rights and privileges that accompany citizenship, including the right to vote, the right to sponsor non-citizen family members, and the right to travel with a passport,” the organization said in a statement. All unjustly denied by the federal government while they also served their country in uniform.
“Through the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress has for decades granted non-citizen service members the right to naturalize through an expedited process, waiving many of the typical requirements for citizenship,” the ACLU said. Since 9/11, over 100,000 immigrants have accessed this path to citizenship. But the administration in 2017 “introduced several onerous requirements that have effectively deprived service members of the expedited path to citizenship guaranteed by Congress.”
The administration’s intentional attack on this process had its intended effect: “In the year following the policy’s implementation, the government reported a 72-percent drop in military service members’ naturalization applications from pre-policy levels,” the ACLU, ACLU of Southern California, and the ACLU of the District of Columbia continued. “What’s more, servicemembers are now less likely than civilians to have their applications approved,” The Washington Post reported last year.
But some of this harm may now be reversed following the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday ruling that the administration’s policy is unlawful. “Congress has long recognized that immigrants who serve in the military during wartime are entitled to be Americans,” ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Scarlet Kim said. “This decision rejects the Trump administration’s racist attempt to subvert this clear congressional mandate in furtherance of its anti-immigrant agenda.”
Unlike the the impeached president, “[n]on-citizens have enlisted in the U.S. military in large numbers throughout our nation’s history, serving in the Revolutionary War and in every major conflict since the founding of the republic,” the groups said earlier this year. “They continue to make up a significant number of those fighting in today’s wars. Between 2011 and 2015, there was an average of about 10,000 non-citizens serving in the Army per year. The Department of Defense estimates that approximately 5,000 green card holders enlist in the military every year.”
We should be grateful for them: “If you are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for America, you are—and should be—entitled to be an American,” the groups said earlier this year. But remember the administration has instead chosen to implement this policy harming U.S. service members as their commander in chief literally wraps himself in the U.S. flag and more recently held a grotesque naturalization stunt that used other immigrants as human props in order to help his campaign.
