The Sovereign Citizen. Patrick Weil
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extracted from immigrants. The payments collected even at this early point in the scheme totaled over a million dollars.28
In April 1935, Samuel H. Kaufman, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, was assigned to the federal district courts surrounding the port of New York to help organize the prosecution of the large number of local denaturalization cases, including those of “aliens who have entered the country unlawfully, persons who have aided in such entry, and perpetrators of naturalization fraud.”29 In 1937, four years after the fraud investigation had begun in New York, 174 indictments were handed down in fraudulent naturalization cases. Among those indicted were ten former employees and two then-current employees of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In all, 3,336 aliens were arrested for deportation proceedings, 140 certificates of naturalization were cancelled, and an additional 279 naturalizations were pending cancellation.30
While denaturalization was higher than ever, the transfer of power between state courts and the federal administration concerning naturalization accelerated in several stages.
First, the Nationality Act of 1940 extended to the state courts the system of INS examiners that was already operating in conjunction with the federal courts.31 State courts that did not elect to adopt the new system were permitted to continue to grant citizenship under the original procedure, requiring the full examination of the petitioner and witnesses at the final hearing. But, as time went on, nonadopting courts were fewer and fewer in number. Court reliance on the conclusions of examiners made judicial naturalization a mere formality (since judges invariably and unquestioningly followed the recommendations of the Immigration and Naturalization Service). As a result, the 1940 Act, in effect, bypassed the courts and conferred the power of designation of examiners directly on the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization.
Second, on May 22, 1940, at the suggestion of Undersecretary of State and close confidant Sumner Welles, Franklin Roosevelt announced the transfer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Department of Justice.32 Since January 1940, Roosevelt had been under pressure from Congress to remove Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins from her post. She had been accused of not enforcing immigration laws when she lobbied to welcome Jewish refugees from Europe and obtained the right to remain for German Jewish visitors already in the United States at the outbreak of World War II.33 And when Perkins dismissed charges against the alleged Communist union leader Harry Bridges, her decision provoked a political firestorm.34
Welles, to whom the president often turned “for fresh ideas and quick action,”35 had convinced him that the transfer of the INS to the Department of Justice was justified because there were various aspects of naturalization and of immigration problems in which the collaboration of the courts was essential, and because, in many cases, investigations were necessary and had to be carried out by the FBI.36 The transfer would also permit Roosevelt to keep Perkins in his cabinet, while placating her opponents.37
On May 21, Roosevelt summoned Attorney General Robert Jackson for a lunch at the White House. “Shortly after lunch arrived,” reported Jackson, “he handed me an Executive Order which proposes immediate transfer of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.” Jackson recalled that Roosevelt “turned to his soup and left the move to me.” He read the order and told the President that “he had no desire to undertake this task; that it was one which no man could long perform acceptably in a period of public excitement; that there was somewhat the same tendency in America to make goats of all aliens that in Germany had made goats of all Jews.” Jackson explained, “I told him that I favored a much stronger border control and a stricter supervision of aliens in the country than we had had in the past, but that I was utterly opposed to a new policy of persecuting or prosecuting aliens just because of alienage.” With all of this Roosevelt agreed, and, his complaints satisfied, Jackson accepted the responsibility of transferring the INS to the Department of Justice.38
This departmental transfer was the last major step toward the federalization of naturalization authority. As a consequence, “the Government need for denaturalization as a remedy for naturalization abuses” decreased “with the increasing supervision of the Department of Justice over naturalization process.”39
The power exercised by the Naturalization Service was also reinforced by the war. Beginning around 1940, naturalization applications poured in: aliens submitted to registration by the Alien Registration Act wanted to express their loyalty and secure their status as citizens40 while an increasing number of companies—particularly in war industries—were reluctant to hire noncitizens. Because, at the time, it employed only 147 naturalization examiners, the INS faced an increasingly long backlog of petitions; in 1941, an applicant was typically required to wait between fourteen and eighteen months before she could become naturalized. Realizing the severity of the problem, Congress increased the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s funding, allowing it to raise the total number of examiners to approximately 400 by 1944.41 The INS assigned these additional examiners “to districts where the demand for naturalization was unusually heavy and arrearages unusually formidable,” including areas such as New York, Newark, Buffalo, Boston and Cleveland.42 With the additional cooperation of the courts, the number of civilian naturalizations rose from 185,000 in 1939 to 393,000 in 1944.
Congress also authorized for the first time in U.S. history, a designated representative of the INS Commissioner to “combine the powers of naturalization examiner and of a naturalization judge” and confer, on foreign soil, American citizenship to noncitizens serving with armed forces abroad.43 Finally in August 1943, in order to “produce uniformity and improvement”44 in the naturalization process, the Immigration and Naturalization Service instituted a centralized review of examiners’ recommendations.45 Under this new system, petitions recommended either for denial or for approval with facts presented to the court, or regarding which the field officer was in doubt as to the proper recommendations, were submitted to the central office for review.46
Additional statutory authority for the INS review process was introduced by the Internal Security Act, passed on September 23, 1950.47 Already, the large-scale administrative review of the naturalization examiners’ work had fulfilled an important purpose: “in achieving uniformity in recommendations and decisions.”48 The 1950 Act relabeled the initial hearing conducted by a naturalization examiner as a “preliminary examination,” and made preliminary examination records admissible as evidence at subsequent final judicial hearings. Naturalization examiners were granted the authority to subpoena a naturalization application and to compel by subpoena the production of relevant evidence.
In the mid-1950s, the INS initiated a program to reduce the number of courts exercising naturalization jurisdiction and to encourage the filing of naturalization petitions in larger courts. In 1955, a total of 950 courts exercised naturalization jurisdiction. This number dropped to 752 in 1958, to 622 in 1964, and to 450 in 1977.
Thirteen years later, naturalization—a responsibility of the judiciary since America’s founding—became a wholly administrative procedure after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990.49 In removing naturalization authority from the judiciary, Congress castigated some courts for tolerating delays of up to two years in processing applications.50 Courts, exclusively those in the federal system, retained only the authority to formally administer the citizenship oath.51 Because of these changes, the age when thousands of courts performed the work of minting America’s citizens was confined to the memory of a small cadre of experts and scholars.
The denaturalization provision of the 1906 Act was originally and primarily conceived as a means of redressing naturalization fraud and illegality committed prior to or during the naturalization process itself—before the moment an alien obtained American citizenship. But, in practice, the Wickersham 1909 Circular limited the cancellation of certificates of citizenship that had been fraudulently or illegally procured to those instances where revoking naturalization would substantially better the country’s citizenry.
Yet even at the height of naturalization corruption in the 1930s, cases where individuals obtained citizenship through