Equal Protection Under the Law? Pshaw!

One of the many things I've been fearing about a possible second Trump administration is its ability to decree things by fiat, such as the personnel changes throughout the civil service that are described in Project 2025, which would install sycophants instead of professionals.

There are other types of changes that could be carried out, especially if there are no people in administrative roles to prevent it. With mass deportations of undocumented people as a top priority — already an unacceptable intention, of course! — there is no way to ensure that anyone deported or held in a camp to be deported is actually undocumented.

As writer Doctora Malka Older said on BlueSky recently, 

Some people think the threat doesn't apply to them. But there is nothing you can do to prove you're a citizen to a government that doesn't want you to be, because the way you prove it is by giving them your documents. And then they have your documents. And that's if they don't change the rules retrospectively.

In response to that post, a woman named Andrea Phillips posted about a historical fact I had never heard:

In 1907, Congress passed a law that American women lost their citizenship if they married a non-citizen. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold this act. It was changed in 1940, but citizenship was not restored to those women, nor their children.

The law only applied to women (of course!), not men who married foreign women. NPR's Code Switch podcast did a segment on it in 2017. If the woman's husband later became a U.S. citizen, she could ask for repatriation. Well thanks, government!

It's important to remember, though, that at this time men from Asian countries were not allowed to become citizens, so that rule didn't apply equally. The U.S. Archives has a more technical article about the processes women had to go through to get their citizenship back.*

Separately, but not fully unrelated, the so-called SAVE Act — which House Republicans are trying to append to the current essential funding votes in Congress — would require anyone who has changed their name to have a fully certified version of their birth certificate and a current form of ID with the same name on it, or proof of a legal name change between the two. This would be a big hurdle for up to 90% of married women (who changed their names), and many transgender people who have changed their names — unless they have gotten a passport... which also satisfies the requirement. (Details in this New Republic article.)

The SAVE Act is not being enacted by presidential fiat, but it's the type of thing to look for under a Trump administration, like the changes to voting that are being attempted in Georgia weeks before the election.  

We won't go back.

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* This bad stuff didn't fully go away until the 1970s... which makes me wonder once again about the past candidacy of Ted Cruz, born in Canada (1970) to a U.S. woman who was married to a foreign national.