I became stateless when I was 14 and my family left the Soviet Union. In exchange for granting my parents, my brother and me exit visas, the U.S.S.R. stripped us of citizenship. For nearly a decade after we arrived in the United States, instead of a passport I carried a long rectangular booklet called a refugee travel document. Not being able to fill in the blank when asked for my nationality added a layer of complexity to some otherwise simple transactions, like opening a bank account, but I was young, white, female and, in the parlance of this country, “legal,” so the difficulties I experienced were not excessive. They were just enough to make me feel precarious.
In the decades since, life for noncitizens in the United States has grown much more difficult. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have pushed immigrants to the margins of American society, cutting off access to public assistance programs, limiting pathways to legal status and ramping up deportations. The giant bureaucracy of “immigration courts” took shape, though it hardly resembles any court system that U.S. citizens would encounter. Its presiding authorities have no political independence, and those they judge are not guaranteed counsel. An estimated 43,000 people are currently held in immigration detention facilities, where some will spend years. In theory, the Constitution guarantees the rights of persons, not just U.S. citizens. But in 1999, the Supreme Court, siding with President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, ruled that some noncitizens facing deportation cannot argue that the Constitution protects them from selective enforcement.
We have grown accustomed to the understanding that this “nation of immigrants” no longer accepts many immigrants as part of the nation. Recently Maura Healey, the progressive governor of Massachusetts — the state where my family came as refugees — boasted, in an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, that she sought to exclude most immigrants from her state’s right-to-shelter law. New York City, which also has a right-to-shelter law, has set a 30-day limit for the use of shelters by migrants. These laws are called “right to shelter” to frame housing as a right, not a privilege. But evidently, not everyone has a right to this right.
A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people from schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19, and barring trans people from serving in the military followed.
The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender. In his executive order on the military, Trump asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.” During an address to Congress in February, Trump recognized a young woman who apparently suffered a brain injury during a volleyball game. Serious volleyball injuries are surprisingly common, but what stood out about this one was that the player who spiked the ball that hit her, the young woman said, was trans.
