I heard that Richard Heene’s wife faced deportation back to Japan is she was convicted of a serious crime. And that this was one reason why she decided to plea guilty to a misdemeanor.
I assume that they are legally married and thus she became an American citizen after passing her citizenship test.
Is it really true that individuals who became American citizens through marriage (that was not fraudulent) can lose their right to stay in the US?
In all probabilities, she is not an American citizen. Some permanent residents, especially those from developed countries that don’t permit dual-citizenship, never apply for naturalization.
AFAIK, someone can only be stripped of their citizenship if it can be proven that it was obtained by fraud.
I read one article in the Washington Post that referred to her as a Japanese citizen.
Yeah, I’m assuming she has a green card and just never bothered to get citizenship. She’d be eligible for citizenship after holding a green card for three years, but Japan doesn’t allow dual citizenship so she may have decided to retain her Japanese citizenship and stay in the US on her green card.
Other people whose countries do allow dual citizenship do not apply for US citizenship either, due to things like viewing the (evidently paraphrased) “won’t have loyalty to any other place” part of the pledge of allegiance as something they just can’t truthfully say.
Others, because they intend to go back to the home country.
Others, because their taxes work better that way.
There’s many reasons not to want US citizenship (or that of any other country, really).
The Supreme Court has ruled that citizens who became that way through naturalization can be stripped of citizenship and deported.
Those people who were are Americans because they were born here cannot be stripped of their American citizenship, though their rights (such as the right to vote) can be modified
This is much more incorrect than it is correct.
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), remains the leading case on the matter. It holds that American citizenship, whether obtained by birth or by naturalization, can not be lost except with the consent of the subject citizen.
Later cases have held that the intent to renounce one’s citizenship may be inferred from one’s actions. But committing criminal acts is not ordinarily considered evidence that a naturalized citizen wishes to surrender his citizenship.
The only real way your pronouncement matches the actual law is that those who have obtained their naturalization fraudulently are subject to having that naturalization reversed. This has happened to some former officials of Nazi Germany who emigrated to the United States and were naturalized while concealing their former Nazi affiliations.
We had a case of a British woman who only had a green card after being here for 30 years. She got busted for running some pot in her car and was deported back to England where she had no relatives left and no friends either. She’s around 60 so I wonder how she will get along there now.
Before internationally adopted kids “automatically” got citizenship they had to be naturalized. In at least one case the parents hadn’t bothered, the kid got arrested for minor possession and deported to Korea - a country he hadn’t been to since he was six months old where he didn’t speak the language and he didn’t have any relations.