Donald Trump has been particularly enthusiastic about deportation since he came back to office as the American President for the second time. Trump’s merciless deportation rules have left families in tears with children getting separated from parents and families who have been American citizens for years getting deported.
As Trump’s deportation obsession shows no signs of calming down, questions regarding if he can deport the likes of Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani have surfaced. While Trump previously shared a great relationship with Musk, things went haywire after the tech billionaire left the Trump administration and started criticizing the President openly on social media. Musk recently spoke against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as well which further fueled the question about his deportation.
Zohran Mamdani, on the other hand, never shared a bond with Trump. The Democratic mayoral candidate of New York, Mamdani was born in Uganda and became an American citizen in 2018. Since Mamdani has been vocal about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) actions, Trump threatened him with an arrest.
To this, Mamdani responded, saying, “The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city.” Talking about Mamdani’s citizenship status, Trump had previously said, “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything.”
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Coming back to Musk, the owner of Tesla, was born in South Africa and became an American citizen in 2002. When Trump was asked if he would deport Musk since he has been quite vocal against Trump, the President said, “we’ll have to take a look.”
It should be noted here that both these people have been legally US citizens since a long time but Trump’s deportation laws don’t only target illegal immigrants but can also affect US citizens. As reported by Time, “The Trump Administration has already pursued policies that strip migrants, including international students and humanitarian parolees, of their visas and legal statuses to be in the country, and it has reportedly deported several U.S.-born children along with their foreign-born parents as it seeks to redefine birthright citizenship.”
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While deportation might not be directly possible for Musk or Mamdani, Trump using Denaturalisation remains a possibility. However, according to legal experts, “Denaturalisation is limited to cases where the government can prove material fraud in their original applications” and therefore denaturalising Musk or Mamdani would be difficult if not impossible.
Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas also weighed in about Trump’s threats of deporting Musk and Mamdani and told Al Jazeera that his claims “appear to be irresponsible rhetoric designed to intimidate political opponents.”
Therefore, presently, it seems that there is no solid legal grounds for Trump to deport Musk or Mamdani and it remains to be seen how the American President further handles this matter.
