Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, unveiled legislation this week to bar naturalized Americans from serving in high levels of government. The proposed constitutional amendment would ban foreign-born U.S. citizens from becoming federal judges or serving in Senate-confirmed positions. "This is the very same standard the President and Vice President are already required to meet," Mace wrote in a public post on May 20. Her push follows a February executive order by President Trump directing agencies to reconsider birthright citizenship.

The Trump administration has also accelerated its efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans through a decentralized denaturalization process. According to reports from Axios, immigration lawyers are being temporarily moved to the Justice Department to prioritize cases involving potential fraud in the legal immigration system. The DOJ has already filed 35 such cases since the start of the President's second term, including 12 in the last few weeks alone. Officials state they are searching for any irregularities that would invalidate a person's legal status.

These measures represent a hardening of the American identity at a time of global instability. Representative Mace specifically targeted three sitting members of Congress—Ilhan Omar, Shri Thanedar, and Pramila Jayapal—as examples of why naturalized citizens should be restricted from power. This legislative push, combined with the administrative crackdown, signals a shift toward a more restrictive and traditional definition of what it means to be a citizen of the republic.