The Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and the Yale Department of History will host the next installment of its Spring 2026 Lecture Series on Statelessness in the Modern World with University of Arizona historian Benjamin Lawrence.

Expanding denaturalization — retroactively stripping of U.S. nationals of unlawfully attained citizenship — is a central plank of Donald J. Trump’s second term (Trump 2.0) expansion of presidential power. While Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship immediately targeting prospective citizens has received considerable attention, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has signaled a re-empowered denaturalization policy will play a pivotal role in reshaping the U.S. citizenship. This talk exposes how Trump/Miller's preferred tool — civil denaturalization — extends presidential authority over citizenship by prioritizing the citizenship deprivation of refugee citizens, former Global South asylum-seekers.

Benjamin Lawrance is a legal historian who works in Africa and with West African migrants around the globe. His research explores mobility, labor, and human rights through time and space, and he has written about historical and contemporary slavery, human trafficking, cuisine and globalization, human rights, refugee issues and asylum policies.