Conservative Group Calls for Denaturalizing Marxists and Islamists
They're naming a political phenomenon that has become ever more visible: socialist activists and Muslim political organizations appearing in the same movements.
The Center for Renewing America says a growing “Red-Green Alliance” threatens the constitutional order. Its proposed remedy would run directly into longstanding Supreme Court precedent. The Center for Renewing America is urging policymakers to confront what it calls a growing “Red-Green Alliance” between the socialist left and political Islam — and ultimately to consider stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship for allegiance to either ideology.
In a series of papers published this summer, the conservative policy organization argues that two movements with seemingly irreconcilable social doctrines have nevertheless discovered a common political language: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, hostility toward Israel and suspicion of the American political and religious inheritance.
“The accelerating fusion of neo-Marxist progressives and radical Islamists within American politics poses an existential threat to the republic,” Wade Miller, a senior fellow at the Center, wrote in a July 30 policy brief. A separate August paper argues that the two sides cooperate not because they share a positive vision of society, but because they share political enemies, including capitalism and Western institutions.
The argument is an attempt to put a name to a political phenomenon that has become more visible since Oct. 7, 2023: young socialist activists and some Muslim political organizations appearing in the same protest movements, particularly around Gaza, despite profound differences over religion, sexuality, feminism and the proper organization of society.
CRA traces the alliance into electoral politics through the original four members of “the Squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar — and portrays New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as its most successful expression to date.
Mamdani is both Muslim and an avowed democratic socialist, although those facts alone do not make him an “Islamist,” a term normally referring to political movements that seek to organize government or law according to Islamic principles. He won office on an explicitly democratic-socialist economic platform and reiterated at his January inauguration that he intended to govern according to those principles.
That distinction matters because CRA’s argument moves considerably further than identifying overlap between parts of the socialist left and political Islam. Its August introduction concludes by calling on policymakers to “begin making the case to denaturalize and strip citizenship for any individual who belongs to either the Red or Green camps.” The group argues that someone fundamentally opposed to the Constitution cannot sincerely have taken the oath of allegiance required for naturalization and that such an oath should therefore be considered fraudulent.
That proposal would represent a dramatic expansion of American denaturalization law.
The Trump administration has already sharply increased the federal government’s use of denaturalization proceedings. The Justice Department said in August that it had filed 123 civil denaturalization complaints since Jan. 20, 2025 — which it described as the largest such effort in recorded history. Recent cases have targeted naturalized citizens accused of concealing violent crimes, sexual offenses, immigration fraud and other legally disqualifying conduct when they obtained citizenship. But existing law does not generally permit the government to revoke citizenship because a citizen later embraces an objectionable ideology.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the government may seek denaturalization when citizenship was illegally procured or obtained through concealment or willful misrepresentation of a material fact. The Supreme Court has also placed significant limits on that authority. In Maslenjak v. United States, the Court held in 2017 that an unlawful statement must actually have played a role in obtaining citizenship; the government cannot retroactively revoke naturalization over an irrelevant falsehood.
The constitutional obstacle is broader still. In Afroyim v. Rusk in 1967, the Supreme Court held that American citizenship cannot simply be withdrawn by the government from someone who has not voluntarily relinquished it, declaring citizenship protected against forcible destruction by Congress “whatever his creed, color, or race.”
CRA’s proposal therefore raises a question beyond whether a “Red-Green Alliance” exists: whether political allegiance itself could ever become evidence that an immigrant fraudulently obtained citizenship years earlier.
The organization’s immediate political argument is easier to understand than its proposed legal remedy. There plainly are places where socialist, anti-imperialist and Islamist politics overlap, particularly on Israel, Western foreign policy and critiques of American power. But cooperation among activists does not erase the enormous ideological gulf between secular socialism and religious political Islam, nor does participation in left-wing or pro-Palestinian politics establish membership in an Islamist movement.
CRA is attempting to persuade the right that those differences matter less than the movements’ common opposition to parts of the existing American order. Its more radical claim is that citizenship itself should depend upon the answer.
