Pam Bondi recently argued that “Being a citizen in our country is a privilege. It’s not a right.” She made the remark while discussing denaturalization, the legal process for taking citizenship away from someone who became an American through naturalization.
That sentence sounds like a simple, even patriotic slogan. Constitutionally, it is a category error. The United States has multiple pathways into citizenship, and the Constitution treats them very differently. Some citizenship is automatic. Some citizenship is granted through a legal process. But once you are a citizen, the government’s power to undo that status is narrow, procedural, and heavily constrained.
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What the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees
The Constitution does not define every right with a neat label, but it does define citizenship with striking clarity.
The Fourteenth Amendment begins with a rule that is meant to be blunt and hard to evade: people born in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of the United States and of the state where they live. That is not a “privilege” that an administration may hand out or revoke when convenient. It is a constitutional status that attaches by birth.
This matters because public debates about immigration often slide between categories: birthright citizenship, lawful permanent residence, visas, asylum, and naturalization. Those are different legal boxes. When someone talks as if “citizenship” is merely a reward for good behavior, they blur away the Constitution’s first and most important line: citizenship by birth is a right created by constitutional text.
Naturalization is not a favor
Naturalized citizenship is different from birthright citizenship in how it is acquired, but not in what it means once conferred. A naturalized citizen is a citizen. Full stop.
There are a couple of constitutional exceptions that are famous precisely because they are rare: naturalized citizens cannot become President or Vice President under the Constitution’s “natural born Citizen” requirement. Aside from that, naturalized citizens stand inside the same constitutional protections as everyone else, including due process and equal protection.
Bondi framed denaturalization in numbers, saying: “And just to put it in perspective, the four years when President Biden was in office, he moved to de-naturalize 24 people, four years. Under President Trump, already 22 within a year.” Those figures, even if taken at face value, do not change the underlying constitutional point. Citizenship is a legal status defined by law. Losing it is not supposed to be a political talking point.
Denaturalization is not deportation
Denaturalization exists, but it is not a shortcut for removing people the government dislikes. The classic grounds involve fraud or illegality in the original naturalization, like lying about key facts that were material to eligibility. Even then, the government has to prove its case through legal process.
That is why the phrase “privilege, not a right” is so combustible. It suggests citizenship is conditional in the way a driver’s license is conditional, something that can be yanked back for later misconduct. But in American constitutional structure, punishment for crimes is handled through the criminal justice system. Citizenship is not meant to be an additional penalty the executive branch can stack on after the fact, especially not for disfavored groups.
Crucially, going to prison does not automatically erase citizenship. A citizen can be incarcerated. A citizen can be released. A citizen can be punished again if they commit new crimes. But citizenship does not evaporate because a politician wants a cleaner narrative.
The Old Dominion example
The on-air discussion made the confusion concrete. A co-host brought up the “Old Dominion shooter” and said: “He’s a naturalized citizen. He goes to jail with ISIS, goes to jail, gets out, and goes and shoots and goes to the ROTC classroom.” Then came the leap that reveals the underlying theory of conditional belonging: “Why was he? I mean, why, from the minute he goes to prison, is he eligible to be deported?” Bondi answered: “Yes.”
That is the premise in miniature, and it is wrong. The Old Dominion University shooter, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, was sentenced to prison because denaturalization is a long and arduous process in itself. The Biden administration could not have legally deported Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, and neither could Trump.
In other words, prison is not a trap door that drops a naturalized American out of citizenship and into instant deportability. If the government believes someone obtained citizenship through fraud, it still has to use the proper process to prove it. That is the whole point of having citizenship mean something more than an on and off switch.
The deeper issue: who belongs
When a high-ranking law enforcement official describes citizenship as a “privilege,” the constitutional worry is not just that the statement is imprecise. The worry is what that framing invites.
- It invites conditional citizenship, where belonging depends on political favor rather than constitutional status.
- It invites unequal citizenship, where naturalized Americans are treated as permanently probationary while birthright citizens are treated as permanent.
- It invites executive convenience, where the hard work of proving guilt in court is replaced by the easier work of arguing someone never deserved to belong.
The Fourteenth Amendment was written in the shadow of a national trauma: a country that had once treated people as property then tried, after emancipation, to keep them from becoming full members of the political community. The Amendment’s citizenship clause is not poetic. It is defensive. It is there to stop the government from playing games with the definition of “us.”
A civics test we keep failing
Bondi’s line has staying power because it flatters a certain instinct: the belief that citizenship is something the government “gives,” rather than a status the Constitution recognizes and protects.
But the American idea runs the other direction. In our system, the government is the conditional thing. Its powers are enumerated and limited. Citizenship, once lawfully held, is not meant to be a revocable grant of grace.
There is room for serious debate about immigration policy, border enforcement, and the standards for naturalization. There is also a right way to have that debate: with constitutional categories intact. If we cannot even agree on what citizenship is under the Fourteenth Amendment, we will not argue well about anything that comes after it.