The Brief

The Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship.

Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving district attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.

At least one person has already been denaturalized in recent weeks. On June 13, a judge ordered the revocation of the citizenship of Elliott Duke, who uses they/them pronouns. Duke is an American military veteran originally from the U.K. who was convicted for distributing child sexual abuse material — something they later admitted they were doing prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.

Denaturalization is a tactic that was heavily used during the McCarthy era of the late 1940's and the early 1950's and one that was expanded during the Obama administration and grew further during President Trump's first term. It's meant to strip citizenship from those who may have lied about their criminal convictions or membership in illegal groups like the Nazi party, or communists during McCarthyism, on their citizenship applications.

Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate wrote in the memo that pursuing denaturalization will be among the agency's top five enforcement priorities for the civil division.

"The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence," he said.

The focus on denaturalization is just the latest step by the Trump administration to reshape the nation's immigration system across all levels of government, turning it into a major focus across multiple federal agencies. That has come with redefining who is let into the United States or has the right to be an American. Since his return to office, the president has sought to end birthright citizenship and scale back refugee programs.

But immigration law experts expressed serious concerns about the effort's constitutionality, and how this could impact families of naturalized citizens.

The DOJ memo says that the federal government will pursue denaturalization cases via civil litigation — an especially concerning move, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

In civil proceedings, any individual subject to denaturalization is not entitled to an attorney, Robertson said; there is also a lower burden of proof for the government to reach, and it is far easier and faster to reach a conclusion in these cases.

Robertson says that stripping Americans of citizenship through civil litigation violates due process and infringes on the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

Hans von Spakovsky, with the conservative Heritage Foundation, supports the DOJ's denaturalization efforts. "I do not understand how anyone could possibly be opposed to the Justice Department taking such action to protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals, and terrorists."

As for the due process concerns, von Spakovsky said, "Nothing prevents that alien from hiring their own lawyer to represent them. They are not entitled to have the government — and thus the American taxpayer — pay for their lawyer."

"That is not a 'due process' violation since all immigration proceedings are civil matters and no individuals— including American citizens — are entitled to government-furnished lawyers in any type of civil matter," he said.

The DOJ and Trump White House declined to comment for this story.

People say the Pledge of Allegiance as part of receiving their citizenship at a Nationalization Ceremony hosted by the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park on Oct. 1, 2024 in Plains, Georgia. The Justice Department is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes, according to a June memo.<br>

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A broad criteria

According to this new memo, the DOJ is expanding its criteria of which crimes put individuals at risk of losing their citizenship. That includes national security violations and committing acts of fraud against individuals or against the government, like Paycheck Protection Program loan fraud or Medicaid or Medicare fraud.

"To see that this administration is plotting out how they're going to expand its use in ways that we have not seen before is very shocking and very concerning," said Sameera Hafiz, policy director of the Immigration Legal Resource Center, a national advocacy organization providing legal training in immigration law.

"It is kind of, in a way, trying to create a second class of U.S. citizens:" where one set of Americans is safe and those not born in the country are still at risk of losing their hard-fought citizenship, she said.

Other immigration experts point to another part of the guidance, which gives U.S. attorneys broader discretion to determine other eligible denaturalization cases. "These categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case," the memo states, and priorities for denaturalization can include "any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue."

Steve Lubet, professor emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, said that language appears to grant the federal government "wide discretion" on deciding whom to target.

"Many of the categories are so vague as to be meaningless. It isn't even clear that they relate to fraudulent procurement, as opposed to post-naturalization conduct," he said.

Von Spakovsky argues, "When we extend the opportunity for naturalization to aliens, we are granting them a great privilege — the privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen. Quite frankly, I don't think it matters whether someone was a human trafficker or a drug smuggler before they entered the country, while they were applying for citizenship, or after their naturalization."

He continued, "Anyone who has abused the privilege of the opportunity of becoming a U.S. citizen should have that citizenship revoked when they engage in such reprehensible behavior."

Lubet, who has written extensively about denaturalization, also raised concerns about the potential impact on families — particularly children whose citizenship was derived through a parent whose naturalization was later revoked.

"What struck me is the ripple effect that this would have on children who were naturalized through their parents," he said. " People who thought they were safely American and had done nothing wrong can suddenly be at risk of losing citizenship."

The DOJ didn't respond to questions about how this could impact children of naturalized parents or what happens in cases where an individual would be left stateless by being denaturalized.

A woman from Peru and her children are detained and escorted to a bus by federal agents following an appearance at immigration court on June 23, 2025, in San Antonio.

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A slippery slope

The order to revoke the citizenship of Elliott Duke, the Army vet originally from the U.K., may be one of the first examples of the Trump administration's aggressive denaturalization efforts in Trump's second term.

In 2012, while serving in Germany, Duke began receiving and distributing child sexual abuse material via email and the internet, according to the DOJ.

In January the following year, Duke became a naturalized American citizen, but revoked their U.K. citizenship to do so.

The DOJ filed a legal case against Duke back in February of this year in Louisiana seeking Duke's denaturalization based both on the conviction for child sexual abuse material and the failure to disclose their crimes during the naturalization process.

In the months it took to get a decision on their case, Duke tried to get a defense attorney to help fight the case — to no avail, they told NPR. Duke was also unable to travel to Louisiana for the court proceedings.

"If you commit serious crimes before you become a U.S. citizen and then lie about them during your naturalization process, the Justice Department will discover the truth and come after you," Shumate, the assistant attorney general, said in a statement.

Duke is still trying to determine what options exist for an appeal and how this impacts their current prison term. But for now, Duke is effectively stateless.

"My heart shattered when I read the lines [of the order]. My world broke apart," Duke said.

Regardless of the crimes Duke committed, the situation sets a dangerous precedent, said Laura Bingham, executive director of the Temple University Institute for Law Innovation and Technology. If the government continues to open the question of citizenship up for people who have already received it, this creates a slippery slope for everyone, she said.

Citizenship "is not supposed to be something that you can continuously open up for some people, and you can't for others," Bingham said.

A woman from Peru signals through the barred and tinted windows of a bus after she was detained following an appearance at immigration court on June 23, 2025, in San Antonio.

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Denaturalization goes back to McCarthy era

In a  2019 report co-authored by Robertson, Un(Civil) Denaturalization, she writes that denaturalization was wielded frequently as a political tool in the McCarthy era.

"At the height of denaturalization, there were about 22,000 cases a year of denaturalization filed, and this was on a smaller population. It was huge," she told NPR.

The Supreme Court stepped in and issued a ruling in 1967 that said that denaturalization is "inconsistent with the American form of democracy, because it creates two levels of citizenship," Robertson explained.

"So the United States went from having 20,000 some cases of denaturalization a year to having just a handful, like 1,2,5,6, very small numbers for years after 1967," Robertson said.

That is, until the Obama administration, which used new digital tools to find potential cases of naturalization fraud going back decades. Under Operation Janus, an initiative launched by immigration and justice officials in the Obama era, they claimed a national security interest in examining potential cases of immigration fraud that could be tied to terrorism.

Then Trump's first administration sought to significantly expand the government's use of denaturalization and chose to file denaturalization cases against individuals via civil courts rather than criminal.

Despite her concerns about the new criteria, Robertson is skeptical how many cases they would apply to.

"The thing is there just aren't very many cases that fit within [the Trump administration's] framework of priorities [for denaturalization]," Robertson said.

"So if they're really intending maximal enforcement, I think what they're going to end up doing is focusing on people who have not committed any serious infraction, or maybe any infraction at all, but people for whom there is a possibility" that there are grounds to revoke citizenship, Robertson said. "It fits in with the other ways that we've seen immigration enforcement happening" under this administration.

Do you have information about the Trump administration's denaturalization effort? Have you been served in a case trying to revoke your naturalized citizenship? Reach out to the authors through encrypted communications on Signal. Jaclyn Diaz is available on Signal at jaclynmdiaz.54 and Juliana Kim is available at julianahkim.82.
Copyright 2025 NPR

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.

NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6.

That's the launch date that the space agency is now working toward following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate. "It's time to get serious and start getting excited."

But she cautioned that there's still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go.

"We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th," she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be "extensive and detailed."

The Artemis II test flight will send four astronauts on an approximately 600,000-mile trip around the moon and back. It will mark the first time that people have ventured to the moon since the final Apollo lunar mission in 1972.

When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.

Members of the Artemis II crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are starting their roughly two-week quarantine to limit their exposure to illnesses before their flight.

Glaze says she spoke to several of the astronauts during the recent test fueling, as they were in Florida to observe the preparations. "They're all very, very excited," she says. "They are really getting a lot of anticipation for a potential launch in March."

Copyright 2026 NPR

An exhibition that takes visitors through the magical water worlds of the 2008 film Ponyo and the hand-drawn artistry of Studio Ghibli is now open at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

The films from the Japanese animation studio and director Hayao Miyazaki have captivated imaginations around the world for decades — this reporter with my four tattoos of favorite Studio Ghibli characters included.

This is now the second time the Miracle Mile museum has dedicated an exhibition to Miyazaki’s works, with the focus on Ponyo arriving more than four years after the retrospective of all his animated feature films.

“These drawings have never been shown outside of Japan,” Shraddha Aryal, the museum’s executive vice president of exhibitions, told LAist. “We have an amazing conservation team who actually cell by cell took care of these, conserved these and that was what led us to say let’s do another exhibition really highlighting their artwork.”

The exhibition includes more than 100 items from Studio Ghibli, including animation cells from Ponyo.

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The cult of Studio Ghibli

Since Studio Ghibli’s founding in 1985, the animation powerhouse has created more than 20 feature films, including My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service and most recently The Boy and the Heron, steadily gaining international acclaim.

Its Spirited Away is among the most celebrated animated movies of all time, becoming Japan’s highest-grossing film and holding that record for 19 years. It was also the first hand-drawn film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003.

The studio and Miyazaki would achieve the same feat again two decades later with The Boy and the Heron in 2024.

Studio Ghibli’s films are often fantastical with a lens of childlike wonder, but they also touch on difficult topics like the horrors of war, fascism, greed and environmental destruction. Characters are complex, with women and girls regularly in strong roles, such as the spear-wielding San or the brave but stubborn Kiki.

For me, there’s something about the carefully crafted storylines and colorful style that still make me feel like I’m exploring the forest with Princess Mononoke or stuck in a secret world of sorcery with Spirited Away, even as an adult.

Miyazaki's magical world

Ponyo is one of Miyazaki’s most kid friendly films — with positive themes of courage and curiosity as the audience tags along with the adventures of the young main characters. Plus, there’s no unnerving scenes of parents being turned into pigs like in Spirited Away (if you know you know).

The 2008 film tells the story of its namesake, the magical goldfish-like creature, Ponyo, and her budding friendship with a 5-year-old human boy named Sōsuke. The film follows Ponyo’s desire to leave her underwater world and become a human to be with Sōsuke, disrupting the balance of nature and having to contend with challenges like a tsunami along the way.

The exhibit creates a 3D version of the filmic world where visitors can climb inside an interactive version of Sōsuke’s green bucket or walk on wave displays like Ponyo in the tsunami.

“Ponyo exhibition is all about this character’s perseverance, and the joyful nature and triumph through ups and downs, [being] willing to explore a new world,” Aryal said. “And it's such a beautiful love story about friendship.”

Reimagining Ponyo

The exhibition includes rare Studio Ghibli donations on display in North America for the first time ever, such as original Miyazaki drawings and Ponyo animation cells, according to the Academy Museum. Guests can explore more than 100 items hand-picked by the studio, including an original animation desk and a make-your-own stop-motion station.

The experience is designed for all ages, reporter superfans with several tattoos of Studio Ghibli characters included.

But Jessica Niebel, the museum’s senior exhibitions curator, told LAist she hopes the Ponyo exhibition helps children feel inspired by the "beautiful messages” of the movie, especially after last year’s L.A. fires and the COVID pandemic.

“Sometimes you live through times where you have a tsunami, where you lose your magic or your mojo, you know, you're not quite sure of your identity,” she said. “[Miyazaki] gives us hope and courage that we can be free and run on the waves like Ponyo.”

“And instead of seeing things as a threat, maybe we use them to carry us,” she continued.

Dipping into the 3-D world

The exhibition is split into four sections focused on different aspects of the film.

The first dives inside Ponyo’s magical underwater home, introducing some main characters with a scene played on a screen spanning nearly the entire room.

The Ponyo exhibition takes visitors inside the 2008 film's magical water worlds.

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The first section includes Ponyo's goddess mother.

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A portrait of Ponyo’s goddess mother, Granmamare, is set up behind a few bean bag chairs in the space, giving guests the sense she’s watching the sea creatures over your shoulder.

The second section centers on Ponyo leaving her home, following her curiosity to dry land where she meets Sōsuke.

The room intentionally reflects the green and blue tones of the film, with curved designs and an interactive bucket that mirrors Miyazaki’s spirit, according to Aryal.

The second section includes the original Japanese release posters from Studio Ghibli’s other famed films, including Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises.

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The walls are lined with the original Japanese release posters from Studio Ghibli’s other famed films, including Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises.

The third section takes you inside “the animators’ imaginative world,” Niebel said. The centerpiece is an original animation desk donated by Studio Ghibli and surrounded by Miyazaki’s detailed drawings for Ponyo.

The exhibition includes rare materials, such as a Studio Ghibli animation desk with drawing supplies.

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Stations are set up where guests can make their own stop motion animation using sea creature cut-outs.

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Two stations are set-up on the side where guests can create their own stop motion animation scene using some of the sea creature cut-out materials sent by the studio, according to Arturo Arias, an Academy Museum educator and gallery attendant.

“It's really nice to have the sort of underwater theme happening and so people submerge — no pun intended — into it and just kind of play along,” Arias told LAist.

The final section focuses on the scene where Ponyo runs on waves instead of being swallowed by the water.

“That's a moment that's really close to my heart and I think it's sensational and only [something] Hayao Miyazaki could do,” Neibel said. “[Ponyo]'s just so joyful and so free.”

Painted waves cascade on the exhibition walls as a bright Ponyo pokes out, with behind-the-scenes clips showcased on the side.

The film follows Ponyo’s desire to leave her underwater world and become a human disrupting the balance of nature with a tsunami along the way.

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Behind the scenes clips from the making on Ponyo were showcased on the side in the last section of the exhibition.

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The movie may be nearly 20-years-old, but Aryal said the hopeful messages of Ponyo are still “really relevant” in the current world and political climate.

“It kind of becomes a refuge, if I may say that, this joyful refuge,” she said. “There is an option for you, even in this sort of disruptive climate that we're living in right now, that you can come and go through this joyful immersive experience.”

Details

The Academy Museum’s “Studio Ghibli’s PONYO” exhibition is open until Jan. 10, 2027. General admission to the museum is free for children and $25 for adults.