Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms

These questions, says migration lawyer Ira Kurzban, are asked to spot whether an applicant obtained their residence validly, a prerequisite for citizenship. US migration authorities have, helium says, go “very exacting” connected this constituent implicit the past 10 years.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Service didn’t respond to an enquiry astir whether forms utilized by its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, asked precisely these questions astatine the clip Musk would person been utilizing them, but experts accidental helium would person been asked substantively akin questions, arsenic the applicable instrumentality hasn’t changed.

“Those grounds of deportability person been astir for decades,” says Yale-Loehr, “and the forms backmost past astir apt had akin oregon identical questions.”

An migrant who makes misrepresentations arsenic portion of the naturalization process tin besides look transgression exposure: Under US national law, making a mendacious connection to oregon concealing a worldly information from the authorities carries a imaginable punishment of 5 years successful prison.

Greg Siskind, a starring immigration attorney, doesn’t disagree that the instrumentality arsenic written could exposure idiosyncratic who lied astir moving without authorization to nonaccomplishment of citizenship, but says that arsenic a applicable matter, it whitethorn not magnitude to a worldly fact.

“If helium had disclosed it, would that person prevented him from getting aboriginal migration benefits?” helium asks. “The reply to that is astir apt no.”

Siskind nevertheless believes that determination are superior questions present about, among different things, the quality of the nonrecreational narration betwixt the Musk brothers. And Musk’s past is highly applicable to the clearances helium reportedly holds arsenic a apical authorities contractor with an extended portfolio of holdings related to nationalist security.

Even if Musk were recovered to person violated the law, helium would not beryllium summarily deported. “It’s mostly rather hard to revoke someone’s citizenship for comparatively insignificant presumption violations which occurred decades earlier,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a elder chap astatine the American Immigration Council, who adds that this is “a bully happening fixed however casual it tin beryllium to interruption arcane migration rules.”

Under Trump, though, respective experts pointed out, the authorities did acold much to denaturalize citizens than it had previously. As Frost wrote successful 2019, successful the archetypal twelvemonth and a fractional of the Trump administration, USCIS opened an bureau dedicated to denaturalization, investigated thousands of citizens, and reported 95 to the Department of Justice with a proposal for deportation. (From 1990 to 2017, determination was an average of conscionable 11 denaturalization cases per year.)

Even if USCIS had coagulated grounds that Musk had breached the law, it would, experts say, not grip the substance administratively, but alternatively could notation it to a US Attorney’s office. Prosecutors, who person wide discretion to instrumentality up oregon diminution cases, could past proceed, oregon not, arsenic they saw fit.

Many of the unfastened questions present could beryllium cleared up by Musk authorizing the merchandise of his migration records nether the Freedom of Information Act. His lawyer, Spiro, did not respond to a question asking whether helium would bash so.