We don't have enough money to feed hungry children but somehow we have unlimited money to hunt down a handful of immigrants here illegally?

It's no secret that Donald Trump despises immigrants, particularly if those immigrants have brown skin, but the white nationalism of this administration is becoming ridiculous:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.

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Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying the people who do this should get a free pass. Faking documentation to get citizenship should result in prosecution and deportation. Fraud is fraud. On the other hand, it's going to cost millions of dollars per person to hunt them down. That is a phenomenal waste of time, energy, and money and it doesn't matter what angle you look at it from. Far more people overstay their visa than cheat the system this way. For the amount of money spent to catch one fake citizen, we could deport several undocumented immigrants (or more). It would be more cost effective to build the stupid wall.

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We're already wasting money on racist immigration policies but this is even worse than usual.

Money to hunt immigrants but not to feed children

Remember, this is the same federal government that is constantly claiming to be broke. We can't pay for school lunches for poor children. CHIP "needs" to be cut by $2 billion because we can't afford medical care for kids with no money. Republicans cut funds to Meals on Wheels because we can't afford to feed the elderly. But we have all the money in the world to chase after people that faked their way into becoming citizens? How very Christian of the Trump administration.

You could make the case for "law and order" but no one takes Trump supporters seriously when they do. Let's move on.

All that leaves is the obvious: White nationalism. This enormous waste of money is a PR gimmick to give Trump's white Republican voters a constant erection. There's nothing they'd like more than to strip all of Those People of their citizenship and this is the next best thing. They won't care how wasteful the spending is because there is literally no amount of money they won't spend to make America white again.

The slippery slope

Making a big production out of stripping citizenship from immigrants lowers the resistance of white Republican Voters to the idea of doing to actual citizens. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to do away with birthright citizenship and he's floated the idea of stripping citizenship from protesters several times. Every time his followers have lustily cheered for it because of course they have. And when the government starts stripping citizenship from, say, nonviolent drug offenders (but not the white ones, of course), white Republican voters will continue to cheer. And why wouldn't they? We'll be getting rid of all the "bad" people and purifying America! Sure, that sounds a lot like the Nazis but you'll get over it. Or else.

This kind of thing doesn't happen all at once but every precedent set makes the next one easier to swallow. Does that mean citizenship by way of fraud should endorsed? No. But the spectacle the Trump administration is surely going to make out of stripping people of their citizenship should be a giant red flag for the rest of the country.

