US Top Court Rules In Favor of Serb Stripped of US Citizenship

The Supreme Court voted on Thursday to restore United States citizenship to a Bosnian Serb woman, Divna Maslenjak, who lied about her husband's military service in the Bosnian war, dealing a blow to President Donald Trump's immigration policy by raising the bar for revoking citizenship. No lawful method exists to involuntarily strip a native-born American of citizenship; naturalized citizens can lose it against their will only if they lied during the naturalization process.

But when applying for asylum, she told the U.S. embassy in Serbia that Ratko Maslenjak had stayed out of the army between 1992 and 1997 and feared reprisals for that.

The court was analyzing a law that makes it a crime to "knowingly procure, contrary to law, the naturalization of any person".

SEE MORE: Citizenship Isn't A Given. That was a lie, she later conceded, and lower courts upheld a criminal conviction against her.

"The government must establish that an illegal act by the defendant played some role in her acquisition of citizenship", Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.

The ruling in Maslenjak vs. USA will ultimately make it more hard for the government to revoke citizenship, rejecting both the current and prior administrations' position that all lies-even minor ones-can lead to loss of citizenship. "That would give prosecutors almost limitless leverage - and afford newly naturalized Americans precious little security", Kagan wrote.

The April arguments in Maslenjak's case were among the most colorful of the term.

This ruling significantly raises the bar for revocation of citizenship.

"Government officials are obligated to apply that body of law faithfully - granting naturalization when the applicable criteria are satisfied, and denying it when they are not".

The jury that convicted Maslenjak, the court concluded, received the wrong instructions.

While the court's ruling did not venture an opinion, justices said at oral argument the government might well prove Maslenjak's lies were material. Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Kagan was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor.

When the untruth was discovered by U.S. authorities, she did not deny it, but argued it had no bearing on her refugee application, based on the fact that her family lived in a Muslim-majority area where they risked persecution from Bosnian Muslims. She was naturalized in 2007.

The government argued that naturalization laws prohibit giving citizenship to persons who lack "good moral character", which Maslenjak demonstrated by giving false testimony for the objective of obtaining refugee status and eligibility for citizenship. But observing that the Supreme Court "often speaks most wisely when it speaks last", Gorsuch explained that he would not have gone any further than that, and in particular that he would not have provided "guidance" about how the causation requirement should work in practice because the parties had not fully briefed it and the lower courts had not yet weighed in.

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