In June, Art had driven out to the USCIS field office in the suburbs for an interview and test. In the waiting room of a nondescript office building, videos of ICE agents arresting immigrants played on a loop. Within the first 100 days of Trump’s inauguration, 369 people had been arrested at the field offices themselves.6 A Columbia student named Mohsen Mahdawi was included in that group and was arrested even though he was in the literal act of taking his citizenship oath.
When Art was summoned down the hall into a room behind a closed door, the immigration officer said, in accented English, “So you finally decided to come in!”
After Art took an oath to tell the truth, he watched the officer read through a file of information and type it into a computer. The file contained a childhood picture Art had never seen of himself. He was not allowed to hold it. He was not allowed to read the papers in the file.
He was required to answer questions that were on the naturalization form, all of which he answered with a no:
Are you a member of the Communist Party?
Have you ever been affiliated with a terrorist organization?
Have you been convicted of any crime?
Have you ever failed to pay your taxes?
Have you sold or manufactured drugs?
He had to write the answer to Where does the President of the United States live? on a digitized pad to prove he knew how to write letters.
Have you been guilty of any moral turpitude? “Cheating on your wife, for example?” the officer suggested. He went on, “I see you were married previously. Now I need to know your ex-wife’s full name, the exact day of your marriage, the reason you got divorced, and the exact date of your divorce.”
“Can I give you a ballpark?” Art said.
“I want you to try really hard to remember everything,” the officer said, handing Art a small piece of blank notepaper. So he wrote down as many dates and motives as he could remember from almost 30 years prior, and the officer stapled that paper to the back of his file.
Then the questions shifted:
Are you willing to serve in the army?
“I registered for the draft when I was 18, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want me at this age.” I’m sure Art was laughing at his own joke then, but the officer was not.
“In a non-combat role.”
“Yes.”
Are you ready to take the oath?
Art raised his right hand and repeated his vows, which I later looked up:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
When asked why he had decided to become a citizen on this day, Art gave an unspecific answer about the “way things are going” and the choice “seeming like the right thing to do.” He did not talk about fear of being detained if he were to travel, or fear of being denied his social security, or fear of being more carefully surveilled because he was only a permanent resident. He said nothing about the fear of being separated from his wife and nine-year-old daughter.
At some point during the appointment, he’d been given a short test, which asked him to name one of Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to America.
“I said the library,” he’d told me when he got home.
“Not the Declaration of Independence or the whole kite electricity thing?”
He shrugged and laughed a little. “Libraries seemed like a good choice.”
Franklin himself would have agreed. In his Autobiography, he bragged that his invention had made farmers as intelligent as anyone else and concluded that “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans.”
Not many of the loudest voices in 2025 seemed to have visited a library in a very, very long time.
6 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation-trump-democracy/
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