There’s a Name for What Trump Is Doing to Trans People: Denationalizing

A friend recently told me that he has devised a way to ask people how they are doing that is appropriate for the current, protracted bad-news moment. He asks , “How are you, personally?”

“My wife is the best and I have a new puppy,” I responded, taking his cue.

Also, I am trans and an immigrant. Personally. My father, my children, my wife and my closest friends are immigrants, too. My friend and I have much in common, but at least for now, I am much less able to separate my personal situation from the campaign of destruction than he is.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.

Arendt once said that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an “enemy alien” in France — before making it to the United States. She was lucky. Her friend Walter Benjamin committed suicide in his eighth year of exile, when the French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops.

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.