Today's Omissions

On Thursday and Friday, the Department of Justice filed denaturalization actions in federal courts across the country against 12 naturalized US citizens, in cases ranging from concealed criminal history to alleged support for terrorism. The 12 are from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia, and Uzbekistan. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described them as "individuals who should never have been naturalized as United States citizens" and told CBS News he is "not sure why this is even controversial."

The structural story is the rate. Between 1990 and 2017, federal authorities filed slightly more than 300 denaturalization cases — an average of 11 per year. Per New York Times reporting, the Trump administration's USCIS issued new guidance in December 2025 directing field offices to "supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month" in FY2026. The target is somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400 cases in a single fiscal year — roughly a 100x to 200x increase from historical baseline. The Justice Department has reassigned career staff to identify potential cases. Legal scholars argue the scale of the campaign likely violates constitutional protections for naturalized citizens. The Northlines reported in July that legal experts described the broader effort as potentially affecting "over 20 million naturalized citizens" through the implied uncertainty alone.

Why this is structural, not just a daily-news item: Naturalization in the US is constitutionally treated as creating a citizen indistinguishable from a native-born American. Once granted, citizenship is supposed to be revocable only by judicial order in narrow circumstances of fraud or willful misrepresentation. The Trump administration's framing — that denaturalization is a "tool for increasing deportations" — converts citizenship into a probationary status for foreign-born Americans, in tension with how the 14th Amendment has been understood for 150+ years. The DOJ's published list of crimes that "qualify" for denaturalization now includes the new May 6 Counterterrorism Strategy's category of "violent left-wing extremists." The pipeline from "naturalized citizen" to "denaturalization candidate" to "deportable" is now structurally established and being actively scaled.

Today, Israel carried out strikes across southern Lebanon killing at least 39 people, including a child, in "some of the most intense [attacks] since the start of a three-week-old ceasefire." Israel said it had hit 85 Hezbollah infrastructure sites in 24 hours. Among the dead: 7 in al-Saksakieh (including a child, plus 15 wounded); a Syrian man and his daughter in Nabatieh; three civilians in Nahrain; three in Saadiyat; three in Haboush; one in Mefdoun; one motorcyclist on the Toul-Doueir road; three young men in al-Bayad neighborhood of Nabatieh. Hezbollah responded by firing several drones into northern Israel, severely wounding one Israeli army reservist and moderately wounding two others.

The structural facts buried in US coverage: Israel has now killed nearly 2,800 people in Lebanon since March 2, 2026 — when the renewed war began — including dozens since the US-brokered "ceasefire" took effect on April 16. Hezbollah has documented more than 500 separate ceasefire violations by Israel. The ceasefire continues to be described in US coverage as an active peace mechanism while it produces daily civilian deaths. The casualty page on this site has Lebanon at 3,300 YTD deaths and rising. The "Black Wednesday" massacre of April 8 — when Israel killed 357 people in coordinated strikes hours after the announcement of the broader Iran war ceasefire — remains the single deadliest day of the war but has dropped almost entirely out of US broadcast memory. A "ceasefire" that produces 39 deaths in a single day is not a ceasefire in any conventional sense. It is the war continuing under a different name.

On Friday, May 8, 80-year-old Hussein Asasa died of natural causes in the village of Asasa, south of Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. His family buried him in the village cemetery where their family has buried its dead for generations. The burial was coordinated in advance with Israeli security forces, who provided all necessary permits. Shortly after the burial, Israeli settlers from the nearby Sa-Nur settlement threatened the Asasa family and ordered them to dig up the body, claiming Hussein had been buried on land that belonged to the settlement. By the time the family arrived, the settlers had already dug down to the body themselves. "We continued digging and got the body and buried him in another cemetery," Mohammed Asasa told reporters of his father's reburial.

The Sa-Nur settlement was originally evacuated under the 2005 Israeli disengagement plan. Netanyahu's government re-authorized the settlement last year. After settlers returned, the Asasa family was told they would now need military permits even to visit the cemetery where their relatives are buried. The Israeli military denied giving the settlers reburial instructions but acknowledged that soldiers were present at the scene and only "confiscated digging tools." Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN OHCHR Palestinian office, condemned the incident as "appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians that we see unfolding across the OPT. It spares no one, dead or alive."

Context the daily coverage misses: Settler attacks in the West Bank have surged since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023. OCHA-documented attacks on Palestinians by settlers have roughly doubled over the past two years. The Sa-Nur incident is not an isolated outrage but part of a broader pattern: re-authorized settlements built on Palestinian land, military-permit regimes that restrict Palestinian access to their own ancestral spaces, and settler violence committed with effective impunity under military protection. The casualty page on this site tracks West Bank violence as a separate active conflict — ~130 Palestinians killed in 2026 alone, 1,170+ since October 2023.