Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/citizenship-passports-and-the-legal-identity-of-americans
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 22:33:04+00:00

Document:
In this Essay, Professor Patrick Weil reexamines the constitutional function of the passport in relation to American citizenship. The State Department recently developed a policy of passport revocation whereby some Americans are transformed into de facto stateless persons, like Edward Snowden, or are prohibited from living abroad as citizens, like dozens of Yemeni Americans. In the Yemeni Americans’ case, the State Department confuses the legality of passports and naturalization. Revoking Snowden’s passport violates the right for a citizen to possess a passport confirming his or her legal identity—including citizenship—while abroad. This passport function, recognized since 1835, is one of the privileges and immunities of American citizens protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court has never authorized its suspension by the executive for national security reasons, unlike the other function of a passport—the right to travel. New technologies offer a way to distinguish between these two functions and to make effective a constitutional right.
From an analysis of historical and legal precedents, it seems clear that the State Department has acted in violation of the Constitution in each of these cases. The revocation of Snowden’s passport violates a privilege and immunity of American citizenship, protected by the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—namely a U.S. citizen’s ability to keep a passport while abroad as a document proving her legal identity and citizenship. This is a function of the U.S. passport that the Supreme Court has recognized since 1835.9 The revocation of the passports of the Yemeni Americans is similarly suspect. If the U.S. State Department contests the legality of their naturalization, their cases should be brought to court on the claim that there is good cause to revoke their citizenship. The cases do differ; Snowden’s citizenship is uncontested while the citizenship of the Yemeni Americans in question seems contestable. But in both instances, when prevented from directly revoking or attacking the citizenship of American citizens—which is staunchly protected de jure by Supreme Court jurisprudence and relevant statutes—the State Department has developed a strategy of attack whereby Americans are transformed into de facto stateless persons (as in the case of Snowden) or individuals who are no longer able to live abroad as U.S. citizens (like the Yemeni Americans). It is time for the courts to intervene and set the rules by clarifying the link between U.S. citizenship and a U.S. passport.
Yet, in so deciding, the Court dealt with only one dimension of the American passport: the one that guarantees American citizens the freedom to travel, i.e., to leave U.S. territory and to cross foreign borders and territories.
The majority opinion in Agee was hotly debated within the Court, provoking a strong dissent by Justice Brennan. For him, the right to travel out of the United States had been recognized as “an important personal right included within the ‘liberty’ guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment” which could only be curtailed by Congress in the exercise of its lawmaking function.23 He feared that the Agee decision “has handed over too much of that function to the Executive.”24Brennan’s criticism is not the point of my argument; let us concede that the revocation of a passport is a necessary executive power insofar as it provides a means to restrict freedom of travel across borders for security reasons. It is not as convincing, however, that, for security reasons, an American citizen should be deprived of her right to a legal identity as an American citizen, the second function of a passport.
While stating that “there is only a constitutional ‘freedom’ to travel internationally—a freedom that may be curtailed within the contours of due process of law,”25 the Court also reaffirmed in Haig v. Agee a constitutional “right” to interstate travel.26 For the Court this distinction was important: the right to travel abroad was a freedom that could be subjected to due process or legislative limitation. The right to travel within the United States was an absolute right before which both the executive and the legislative powers had to bow. I believe that if the Court had inquired further, it would have also affirmed a constitutional right for an American travelling or residing abroad—that of keeping his or her passport as a valid identity document. If asked today by Edward Snowden, for example, the Court would have to confirm that it is his absolute right not to be deprived of his legal identity as an American citizen. This absolute right can first be deduced from the absolute protection afforded to him by his status as a citizen.
This absolute protection was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1967 in Afroyim v. Rusk27 and has received additional confirmation in subsequent cases.28 In the preceding decades, citizenship was conditional: starting in 1906, naturalized citizens who would return to reside in their country of origin would be denaturalized.29 Starting in 1907, American women marrying foreigners would lose their citizenship.30 Later, under the 1940 Nationality Act, Americans could and did lose their citizenship if they voted in foreign elections, escaped the draft, or remained six months or longer within any foreign state of which he or either of his parents was ever a national31—adding to a list which already included denationalization for Americans who became citizens of a foreign state.32 Between 1945 and 1967, more than 100,000 Americans, mostly native-born, were denationalized.33 Citizenship was less protected than liberty, life, or property, for denationalization was legally possible without due process.
Since then, the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been interpreted as a right that is granted absolute protection. Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment states first that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. Then it continues with the following sentence: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”36 These privileges and immunities were narrowly defined in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases,37 a decision that provoked and continues to provoke great controversy. Many scholars have claimed that the Court did not fulfill the original purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment.38 Nevertheless, the Constitution affirms some privileges and immunities of American citizens and—however narrowly defined by the Court in the Slaughter-House Cases—even this minimalist conception turns out to be consequential.
The privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, Justice Miller wrote for the majority, are those which “ow[e] their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.”39 Miller then enumerated these privileges and immunities, and it is possible to distinguish the ones he defines as owed to the Constitution—namely, the rights guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as rights to peaceably assemble, petition for redress of grievances, and claim the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus—from those owed to the federal government and to its national character—for example, the right to freely access the nation’s seaports and to use the navigable waters of the United States.40 All these privileges and immunities are said to protect American citizenship from any abridgment by the states.
The protection by the federal government of life, liberty, and property is a constitutional right subject to due process. The rights of protection and care while abroad, part of the privileges and immunities of citizens of all free governments, have evolved over time. I believe that the right to possess basic identity documents detailing one’s date and place of birth, along with names and surnames, has become an absolute right, as much a fundamental human right developed throughout the twentieth century as a constitutional one stemming from Afroyim.
Among the numerous rights proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, the “right to a nationality” guaranteed in Article 15 has become one of the most respected and protected.
When a person lacks citizenship, the international community provides a proxy: protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and rights in the country of residence44 fulfill the functions nationality plays in linking an individual with a nation-state. The international community does not provide an analogous proxy in situations where other rights are denied, for example, when due process is lacking or gender discrimination is obvious.
Even when not issuing biometric passports, all member states of the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations specialized agency, have achieved their goal of “global interoperability,” understood as the capability of inspection systems (whether manual or automated) in different states throughout the world to exchange data, to process data received from systems in other states, and to utilize that data in inspection operations in their respective states on Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs).61It is therefore easy for the executive to suspend the first function of a passport—the right to travel—and to make this information available throughout the world without revoking the passport as a document that permits its bearer to prove her identity and to be recognized as an American citizen. If a fundamental right of any American citizen is at stake in the distinction of the different functions of a passport, and if no technical issue can be raised as an obstacle for the fulfillment of this right, the time has come for the courts to consider the issue.
When Chief Justice Burger wrote the majority opinion in Haig v. Agee, he at first did not deal with the constitutional issues raised in the case; he did so later, reluctantly, and in the opinion of Justice Powell, with a “summary” treatment.62 The revocation of Snowden’s passport could offer the Court an opportunity to finally examine the different dimensions of a passport in a new constitutional and technological context. This is especially true given that Snowden’s case is one among an increasing number of cases where the State Department seems to have confused a passport policy with citizenship itself.
The same reasoning could apply to the State Department, which is in charge of delivering millions of passports every year. The significance of this logic extends well beyond the cases that have recently come to light. At least those Yemeni Americans subject to State Department action had their cases taken up by some lawyers and NGOs. Other Americans abroad do not have similar access to legal counsel and may not know that they have grounds for legal appeal should they feel that their status as American citizens is unfairly contested. This further underscores the need for clarification by the courts.
The State Department seems to be abusing its power with passport revocation—unknowingly in the case of Snowden, as the Department could at first glance rely on a jurisprudence that seemed until recently to favor executive power, and willfully in the case of the Yemeni Americans. It therefore seems that it is time for courts confronted with passport revocations to reexamine the constitutional function of the passport and its status in relation to American citizens who, since Afroyim, have gained more protection over their citizenship in relation to the state—including in relation to the Secretary of State. Today it is commonplace to say that new technologies infringe upon civil liberties—they often do. However, in the case of passports and the essential right of Americans to maintain a legal identity, new technologies offer an avenue to protect that very right. By affirming both that a passport belongs among the privileges and immunities of an American abroad and that the Secretary of State cannot revoke a passport as a matter of administrative routine, courts could make the passport an almost inalienable auxiliary of the American citizen abroad: the symbol and substance of an irreducible citizenship which the Supreme Court has already proclaimed.
Patrick Weil is a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.) in the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. His most recent book is The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Among his other recent publications are From Conditional to Secured and Sovereign: The New Strategic Link Between the Citizen and the Nation-State in a Globalized World, 9 Int’l J. Const. L.615 (2011)and (with Son-Thierry Ly) The Anti-Racist Origins of the American Immigration Quota System, 77 Soc. Res. 45 (2010).
I would like to thank especially Daniel Hemel, Yaman Salahi, and Michael Wishnie, as well as Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Michel Dejaegher, Giorgios Dimitropoulos, Owen Fiss, Itamar Mann, Gerald Neuman, Noah Rosenblum, and Eugene Rusyn for their numerous and decisive contributions to this Essay. I am most grateful to Idriss Fofana and Nicholas Handler, my research assistants at Yale Law School, for their invaluable creativity and reactivity. At the Yale Law Journal, Benjamin Farkas has been a fantastic editor and discussion partner, Benjamin Eidelson encouraged me to submit a proposal and then, together with Ryan Thoreson, has worked behind the scenes. Thanks to all.
Preferred citation: Patrick Weil, Citizenship, Passports, and the Legal Identity of Americans: Edward Snowden and Others Have a Case in the Courts, 123 Yale L.J. F. 565 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/citizenship-passports-and-the-legal-identity-of-americans.
Urtetiqui v. D’Arcy, 34 U.S. 692, 699 (1835).
Agee, 453 U.S. at 309-310.
Id. at 318 (Brennan, J., dissenting) (quoting Zemel v. Rusk, 381 U.S. 1, 12 (1965)).
453 U.S. at 309 (explicitly ruling on Agee’s “right to travel”).
Id. at 312 (Brennan, J., dissenting) (citing Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958)).
Agee, 453 U.S. at 306.
Vance v. Terrazas, 444 U.S. 252 (1980); Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S 815 (1971).
Act of June 20, 1906, ch. 3592, § 15, 34 Stat. 596, 601.
Expatriation Act of 1907, ch. 2534, § 3, 34 Stat. 1228, 1228-29.
Nationality Act of 1940, ch. 876, §§ 401-402, 54 Stat. 1137, 1169.
In addition 3,713 were denaturalized. See Patrick Weil, The Sovereign Citizen 197-99 (2013).
Afroyim, 387 U.S. at 268.
Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872).
Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. at 37.
Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. at 79.
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, supra note 44, at art. 28.
James C. Hathaway, The Rights of Refugees Under International Law 237 (2005).
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 257.
See Weil, supra note 33, at 183-85.
See Urtetiqui v. D’Arcy, 34 U.S. 692, 699 (1835).
See sources cited supra notes 66-67.
Pub. L. No. 101-649, § 339(b)(18)(D), 104 Stat. 4978, 5046.
Expatriation Act of 1907, ch. 2534, § 2, 34 Stat. 1228, 1228.
See Weil, supra note 33, at 85.
264 U.S. 353, 358 (1924).
Weil, supra note 33, at 88-91.
Nationality Act of 1940, ch. 876, 54 Stat. 1137.
Admin. Certificates of Citizenship, 41 U.S. Op. Att’y Gen. 452, 461 (1960).
Peter Baker & Ellen Barry, Snowden, in Russia, Seeks Asylum in Ecuador, N.Y. Times, June 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/nsa-leaker-leaves-hong-kong-local-officials-say.html.
Id. On June 6, 2013, the Guardian and the Washington Post published the first articles revealing the secret NSA operations. Roy Greenslade, How Edward Snowden Led Journalist and Film-Maker to Reveal NSA Secrets, Guardian, Aug. 19, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com /world/2013/aug/19/edward-snowden-nsa-secrets-glenn-greenwald-laura-poitras. See also Barton Gellman & Laura Poitras, U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program, Wash. Post, June 6, 2013, http://www .washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet -companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497 _story.html (publishing Snowden’s initial revelations). Three days later, Snowden revealed himself as the source of the leaks. Philip Rucker & Sari Horwitz, In Snowden Playbook, Obama Administration Prioritized Legal Channels over Diplomacy, Wash. Post, June 28, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-snowden-playbook-obama-administration -prioritized-legal-channels-over-diplomacy/2013/06/27/17523a0a-de7b-11e2-b797-cbd4cb13f9c6 _story.html.
Baker & Barry, supra note 1. The charges contained allegations of theft of government property and two violations of the Espionage Act. Sari Horwitz et al., Legal, Political Maneuvering Let Snowden Flee, Wash. Post, June 24, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com /world/national-security/legal-political-maneuvering-let-snowden-flee/2013/06/23/5643e0b6 -dc36-11e2-bd83-e99e43c336ed_story.html.
Kevin Rawlinson, Russia Grants NSA PRISM Whistleblower Edward Snowden a Year’s Asylum, Indep. (London), Aug. 1, 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe /russia-grants-nsa-prism-whistleblower-edward-snowden-a-years-asylum-8741940.html.
Letter from Eric H. Holder, Jr., Att’y Gen, U.S., to Alexander Vladimirovich Konovalov, Minister of Justice, Russ Fed’n (Jul. 23, 2013), http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents /740227/attorney-genral-letter-to-russian-justice-minister.pdf; Sari Horwitz & Michael Birnbaum, U.S. Won’t Seek Death Penalty for Snowden, Holder Says in Letter to Russian Official, Wash. Post, July 26, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-will-not-seek-death-penalty-for-snowden-holder-says-in-letter-to-russians/2013 /07/26/5ab3f4da-f601-11e2-aa2e-4088616498b4_story.html.
. 22 C.F.R. § 51.60(a) (2014) states that “[t]he Department may not issue a passport, except a passport for direct return to the United States,” before enumerating the cases in which the Department can act in such a way. It is this particular type of passport—available only for a short period, solely for the purpose of permitting direct return to the United States—that Attorney General Holder was referencing in his letter. See also infra note 69 (discussing the case of passports recently issued to Yemeni Americans following the revocation of their passports).
Al Kamen, In Yemen, U.S. Embassy Confiscating Some Passports, ACLU Warns, Wash. Post, Jan 9, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-yemen-us-embassy-confiscating -some-passports-aclu-warns/2014/01/09/8011d2fa-7956-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story .html.
Id at 283-84. On December 23, 1979, the U.S. Consul General in Hamburg notified Agee that the State Department was revoking his U.S. passport. Its authority to act was based on 22 C.F.R. § 51.70(b)(4), which allowed the Secretary of State to refuse to issue (or deny) a passport if she “determines that the national’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States,” and on 22 C.F.R. § 51.71(a), which permits the Secretary to revoke a passport for any reason allowing him to deny it. Id. at 311 (Brennan, J., dissenting).
Transcript of Oral Argument, Agee, 453 U.S. 280 (No. 80-83), http://www.oyez.org/cases /1980-1989/1980/1980_80_83.
Agee was decided on June 29, 1981. At the end of May 1981, Chief Justice Burger circulated a draft opinion that did not address the constitutional claims that Agee was presenting. On May 29, Justice White informed the Chief Justice that “several of us, perhaps as many as five, indicated that both statutory and constitutional issues should be dealt with.” Letter of Justice Byron White to Chief Justice Warren Burger, May 29, 1981 (on file with the Library of Congress, Brennan Papers, I 543/1). On June 3, Chief Justice Burger circulated additional pages, which would become Part III of his opinion. Memorandum from Chief Justice Warren Burger to the Supreme Court (on file with Library of Congress, Brennan Papers, I 543/1).
See generally Agee, 453 U.S. at 306-10 (containing no discussion of the recognition and identification function of passports).
Letter of Justice Potter Stewart to Chief Justice Warren Burger, June 23, 1981 (on file at Yale University Archives, Potter Stewart Papers, box 365, folder 1367). In this letter, Justice Stewart mentioned Califano v. Aznavorian, 439 U.S. 170, 176 (1978), where he delivered the majority opinion, and asked Burger to substitute the word “freedom” for the word “right” used in the first draft of his Part III of Haig v. Agee.
Id. at §§ 401-410, 54 Stat. at 1168-1171. Although denaturalization had similar consequences to denationalization for the individual, the two are distinct: denationalization denotes a loss of citizenship, whereas, in theory, a denaturalized person has never been a citizen.
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967). The struggle that led Justice Black and Chief Justice Warren to find a way to declare citizenship an absolute right while in the minority of the Court in Peres v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958), and to summon the majority in Afroyim nine years later, after many divisive cases had been decided—often in contradiction with each other—is described in Weil, supra note 33, at 145-75.
See Gerald Gunther, Constitutional Law 410 (12th ed. 1991) (arguing that the Slaughter-House Cases “implicitly rejected . . . the position that all the Bill of Rights guarantees were made applicable to the states by the post-Civil War constitutional changes”); L.H. LaRue, The Continuing Presence of Dred Scott, 42 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 57, 61 (1985) (arguing that the Slaughter-House Cases “look like the deep mirror image of Dred Scott. . . . With the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, blacks became citizens, but Miller gutted the meaning of that by stripping citizenship of any important legal consequences”); Timothy Sandefur, Privileges, Immunities and Substantive Due Process, 5 N.Y.U. J. L. & Liberty 115, 115 (2010) (arguing that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was “famously mutilated by the . . . Slaughter-House Cases”); Kimberly C. Shankman & Robert Pilon, Reviving the Privileges or Immunities Clause to Redress the Balance Among States, Individuals and the Federal Government, 3 Tex. Rev. L. & Pol. 1, 20 (1998) (“Five years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court, in the infamous Slaughterhouse Cases, effectively eviscerated the Privileges or Immunities Clause, thereby fundamentally changing the course that Congress and the American people had meant the Court to follow.”).
Kevin Christopher Newsom, Setting Incorporationism Straight: A Reinterpretation of the Slaughter-House Cases, 109 Yale L.J. 643, 678-79 (2000).
Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. at 97 (quoting Corfield v. Coryell, 6 F. Cas. 546, 551 (C.C.E.D. Pa. 1823)).
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees art. 27, July 28, 1951, 19 U.S.T. 6259, 189 U.N.T.S. 150; Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons art. 27, Sept. 28, 1954, 360 U.N.T.S. 117.
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, supra note 44, at art. 28; see also Identity Documents for Refugees, U.N. High Comm’r for Refugees (July 20, 1984), http://www.unhcr.org/3ae68cce4.html.
The United States has not signed the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, or the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. See also U.N. High Comm’r for Refugees & Open Soc’y Justice Initiative, Citizens of Nowhere: Solutions for the Stateless in the U.S. 3 (Dec. 2012), http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/citizens-of-nowhere -solutions-for-the-stateless-in-the-us-20121213.pdf. The United States has, however, signed the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees; under Article 1 of the Protocol, signatories “undertake to apply articles 2 to 34 of inclusive of the Convention [Relating to the Status of Refugees] to refugees as hereinafter defined.” Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees art. 1, Jan. 31, 1967, 606 U.N.T.S. 267.
Snowden remains a citizen of the United States, and only of the United States, which distinguishes his case from those of individuals with dual nationalities.
A copy of Snowden’s Russian-issued identity document is available at Steven Lee Myers & Andrew E. Kramer, Defiant Russia Grants Snowden Year’s Asylum, N.Y. Times (Aug. 1, 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/world/europe/edward-snowden-russia.html (featuring an image of the identity document).
Jens Vedsted-Hansen, Article 27, in The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol: A Commentary 1165, 1165 (Andreas Zimmerman et al. eds., 2011).
Edwin M. Borchard, The Protection of Citizens Abroad and Change of Original Nationality, 43 Yale L.J. 359, 361, 363 (1934).
As Justice Stevens argued in his majority opinion in Saenz v. Roe, “the protection afforded to the citizen by the Citizenship Clause of that [Fourteenth] Amendment is a limitation on the powers of the National Government as well as the States.” 526 U.S. 489, 507-08 (1999).
Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 1979, Pub. L. No. 95-426, sec. 707(b), § 215(b), 92 Stat. 992 (codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1185(b) (2012)). See Joy Beane, Passport Revocation: A Critical Analysis of Haig v. Agee and the Policy Test, 5 Fordham Int’l L.J. 185 (1981) (noting as an exception that in 1978, citizens did not need a passport to travel between the United States and adjacent countries, with the exception of Cuba). Since 2004, as a result of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-458, § 7209, 118 Stat. 3638, 3823, U.S. citizens need a passport or a passport card to travel to neighboring countries.
Adam I. Muchmore, Passports and Nationality in International Law, 10 U.C. Davis J. Int’l L. & Pol’y 301, 324, 340-41 (2004).
On May 28, 2003, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which establishes the global standards for passports, released “a global, harmonized blueprint for the integration of biometric identification information into passports and other Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs).” Press Release, Int’l Civil Aviation Org., Biometric Identification to Provide Enhanced Security and Speedier Border Clearance for Travelling Public (May 28, 2003), http://legacy.icao.int/icao/en/nr/2003/pio200309_e.pdf. In the blueprint, “[f]acial recognition was selected as the globally interoperable biometric for machine-assisted identity confirmation with MRTDs.” Id. The ICAO has since revised its blueprint to include the possibility of using fingerprint and iris recognition. See Machine Readable Travel Documents, Int’l Civil Aviation Org. (6th ed. 2006), http://www.icao.int /publications/pages/publication.aspx?docnum=9303.
Machine Readable Travel Documents: Supplement to ICAO Doc 9303, Int’l Civil Aviation Org. (Oct. 21, 2013), http://www.icao.int/Security/mrtd/Documents/Supplement%20to %20ICAO%20Doc%209303%20-%20Release_13.pdf.
Machine Readable Travel Documents, Int’l Civil Aviation Org. at iii, I-1 (6th ed. 2006), http://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p1_v1_cons_en.pdf.
On June 3, 1981, the day Chief Justice Burger circulated the first draft of Part III of his opinion, he also wrote to his five colleagues who were forming the majority: “I continue to have serious doubts about deciding the Constitutional issues when (a) there is a statutory basis for decision; and (b) the Court of Appeals did not decide the Constitutional issues. Is ‘saving of judicial time’ a sufficient basis for departing from long-standing practice?” Memorandum by Chief Justice Warren Burger to Justices Stewart, White, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, and Stevens (Jun. 3, 1981) (on file with Library of Congress, Blackmun Papers, 332, folder 2). After receiving these additional pages, Justice Powell replied to the Chief Justice: “As to the constitutional issue, I agree with your Part III. I am in favor of brevity (especially at this season of the year), but the treatment of the issue is somewhat more summary than I would have expected.” Letter from Justice Lewis Powell to Chief Justice Warren Burger (June 5, 1981) (on file with Library of Congress, Brennan Papers, I 543/1).
In March 2011, the State Department sought to revoke the passport of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al Aulaqi for the reason that his activities abroad were “causing and/or likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” Cable from U.S. Dep’t of State to U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, Passport Revocation—Anwar Nasser Aulaqi (Mar. 24, 2011), http://www.scribd.com/doc/114624904/Anwar-al-Aulaqi-Docs-Combined#page=63. The State Department instructed the American embassy in Sana’a, Yemen to send a message to Mr. Aulaqi, who resided in the country, asking him to collect an important letter. Id. Embassy officials were to revoke Mr. Aulaqi’s U.S. passport upon his arrival at the embassy. Id. It remains unclear whether Mr. Aulaqi ever collected the letter. Catherine Herridge & Kristin Brown, Al-Awlaki Faced Loss of U.S. Passport Before Drone Strike Killed Him, Documents Show, Fox News (Nov. 27, 2012), http://www.foxnews .com/politics/2012/11/27/al-awlaki-faced-loss-passport-6-months-before-drone-strike-killed -him-documents. Mr. Aulaqi was killed in a drone strike in September 2011. Id.
Know Your Rights: What to Do at U.S. Embassy Interviews and If Your U.S. Passport is Revoked, ACLU N Cal, et al. (2013), http://wemeantwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12 /Passports-KYR-English-12.17.2013.pdf.
In some cases, these people were children when they immigrated to the United States and naturalized as minors. Interview with Yaman Salahi, Staff Attorney, Nat’l Sec & Civil Rights Program at Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus in S.F., CA (Mar. 21, 2014).
Amel Ahmed, Yemeni Americans Cry Foul over Passport Revocations, Al Jazeera Am., Jan. 21, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/21/yemeni-americanscryfouloverpassport revocations.html.
Al Kamen, In Yemen, U.S. Embassy Confiscating Some Passports, ACLU Warns, Wash. Post, Jan. 9, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-yemen-us-embassy-confiscating -some-passports-aclu-warns/2014/01/09/8011d2fa-7956-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story .html.
Originally, the U.S. embassy in Yemen was confiscating passports and was not informing people that they continued to have the right to travel back to the United States. However, after the ACLU and other NGOs got involved, the State Department and the embassy created a process in February 2014 by which people whose U.S. passports had been confiscated could request a document called either a “direct return” or “limited validity” passport. It is good for thirty days and only for travel to the United States, and will be confiscated upon arrival at a U.S. port of entry. Interview with Yaman Salahi, supra note 65.
See, e.g., Magnuson v. Baker, 911 F.2d 330, 333 n.6 (9th Cir. 1990) (“A certificate of naturalization or of citizenship issued by a naturalization court is simply a record of the court's determination of the question of citizenship. As a record of a final court decision, a certificate is conclusive evidence of the court's determination of the litigated issue, i.e., citizenship. Because a certificate is conclusive evidence of citizenship, if a holder of a certificate from a naturalization court presented the certificate to the Secretary in order to obtain a passport, the Secretary could not relitigate the citizenship issue. The Secretary could question only the certificate's authenticity, i.e., whether the certificate is a forgery.”).
See USCIS Policy Manual: Volume 12: Citizenship and Naturalization, Part L: Revocation of Naturalization: Chapter 1: Purpose and Background, U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., http://www.uscis.gov/policymanual/HTML/PolicyManual-Volume12-PartL-Chapter1.html (last updated Apr. 8, 2014) (confirming that “[f]or civil revocation of naturalization, the United States Attorney’s Office must file the revocation of naturalization actions in Federal District Court” and citing Gorbach v. Reno, No. C-98-0278R, 2001 WL 34145464 (W.D. Wash. 2001) (granting order for permanent injunction)).
Kungys is the Supreme Court’s most recent interpretation of what 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a) requires for judicial denaturalization. The petitioner immigrated in 1948 and was naturalized as a citizen in 1954. In 1982, the Justice Department commenced denaturalization proceedings on three grounds: (1) Kungys had participated in the slaughter of two thousand Jewish Lithuanian civilians in 1941 during World War II; (2) Kungys made false statements concerning his date and place of birth as well as his employment and residence during World War II (the “concealment and misrepresentation” claim); and (3) even if Kungys’s false statements were not in themselves material to his original naturalization proceeding, their falsity indicates that Kungys lacked the requisite “good moral character” for naturalization (the “illegal procurement” claim). 485 U.S. at 764-65. In response, the district court found that the evidence as to (1) was unreliable, that Kungys’s false statements were not material to his denaturalization, and that, because they were not material, they could not be used to show Kungys’s lack of good moral character. See United States v. Kungys, 571 F. Supp. 1104, 1104 (D.N.J. 1983). The Third Circuit upheld the district court regarding claim (3), but reversed its decision on claim (2) and declined to decide claim (1). See United States v. Kungys, 793 F.2d 516, 516-17 (3d Cir. 1986). The Supreme Court then agreed to consider the standards required for the “concealment and misrepresentation” claim (but only as to the date and place of Kungys’s birth) and the “illegal procurement” claim. 485 U.S. at 766. It did not reexamine the question of Kungys’s participation in World War II atrocities. Id. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia ruled with respect to the “concealment and misrepresentation” claim that “the test of whether Kungys’ concealments or misrepresentations were material is whether they had a natural tendency to influence the decisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” or if their disclosure might have been useful in an investigation possibly leading to the discovery of other facts warranting denial of citizenship. Id. at 772. On the separate question of whether the citizenship was “illegally procured” under 8 U.S.C. § 1101(f) because the petitioner lacked the good moral character required, the Court held that that section of the Act does not contain a materiality requirement because the primary purpose is to identify lack of good moral character, not to prevent false pertinent data from being introduced into the naturalization process. Yet it applies only to oral statements made under oath and to misrepresentations made with the subjective intention of obtaining immigration benefits, which was not the case for Kungys. Id. at 780.
In the 1906 Naturalization Act, a provision permitted the initiation of denaturalization proceedings against a naturalized citizen who had returned to his country of origin within the five years following his naturalization. ch. 3592, §15, 34 Stat. 596, 601.
Naturalization—Citizenship—Residence in Native Country for Two Years—Status of Wife, 28 Op. Att’y Gen. 504, 507-08 (1910).
Id. at 90 (quoting Letter of Frank B. Kellogg, Sec’y of State, to James J. Davis, Sec’y of Labor (Mar. 26, 1926) (on file at NARA, RG 85, INS Records, Central Office, Naturalization Files, 1906-1940, entry 26, file 15 GEN)).
Id. at 460. This opinion concerned the case of Albert Flegenheimer, who was born in Germany on July 4, 1890 to a naturalized father. His citizenship was recognized by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1942; it was confirmed again in 1952. In 1959, the State Department contested his status after having earlier agreed to represent him as an American citizen in the Italian-American Commission against the Italian government while he sought to obtain the cancellation of a sale of property made in Italy in 1941 under duress. The commission concluded on September 20, 1958 that he was not an American citizen and rejected the U.S. claim. Flegenheimer Case, 14 R.I.A.A, 327, 389-90 (Ital.-U.S. Concil. Comm’n 1958).
. Gorbach v. Reno, 219 F.3d 1087, 1095 (9th Cir. 2000) (en banc) (quoting Castillo-Villagra v. INS, 972 F.2d 1017, 1026 (9th Cir. 1992)).

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