Crackdown without bounds

This week brought a truly rare example of the Trump administration’s routine attacks on immigrants: one that the administration itself seemed to regret. The policy announced Wednesday by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would deny automatic citizenship to some children of military personnel and federal employees living abroad, forcing their families to apply for the status. While the change appeared likely to affect a small share of those deployed, it provoked an outpouring of outrage from veterans’ groups and others rightly appalled at the idea of penalizing those serving the country overseas.

The uproar was such that administration officials, who typically take pride in their xenophobia, were at pains to downplay the reach of the policy, characterizing it as a technical change necessitated by legal and bureaucratic considerations that would affect only 20 to 25 families a year. Ken Cuccinelli, an antiimmigrant hardliner who became acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services in June, attempted to tame the gathering furor by noting that the policy “does NOT impact birthright citizenship,” a constitutional principle that both he and President Trump have questioned.

The change is expected to affect children adopted by citizens serving abroad, children born to citizens overseas who were recently naturalized or have lived in the United States for less than five years, and those born to noncitizens deployed overseas. Even if the administration’s reassurances are accurate, it will be a hardship for a number of military and civilian families serving the United States in foreign countries.

It’s that much more difficult to see the move as an innocent matter of administrative housekeeping in the context of the broader immigration crackdown. The administration’s attacks on immigrants, to whom this country owes its prosperity and its existence, have been ceaseless and comprehensive, targeting legal and illegal entries alike, the highly skilled as well as the unskilled, and every status from undocumented to naturalized.

This month alone has seen Cuccinelli’s agency unveil policies that will punish immigrants for receiving public assistance and deport more migrants receiving lifesaving medical care. More immigrants are thought to be forgoing government help because of revised rules allowing officials to deny them legal status based on the likelihood that they will constitute a public burden. And several families of sick children receiving critical care that isn’t available in their home countries have been told that circumstance will no longer spare them from deportation.

The policy announced this week isn’t even the first to take a more hostile stance toward immigrants serving in the armed forces. The administration has also subjected noncitizen military personnel to additional screening, discharged enlisted immigrants who were promised a path to citizenship, and stopped protecting undocumented members of the military from deportation.

With a tradition of robust immigrant and noncitizen military service dating to the country’s founding, and with more than half a million foreignborn veterans in the United States today, such policies throw the contradictions of the Trump administration’s antiimmigration zealotry into high relief. In a nation of immigrants, an attack on immigration is an attack on the nation itself.