On March 3, 2026, the congressman for Georgia's 9th District posted seven words on X:

"No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat."

Read that again slowly. The first sentence is a ban on immigrants based on their religion. The second sentence is about people who are already American citizens. Andrew Clyde wasn't just talking about who gets to come here. He was calling for taking citizenship away from Americans and throwing them out of the country because of what they believe about God.

Mother Jones counted Clyde's post as one of a wave of anti-Muslim statements from Republicans in Congress this spring. Muslims make up about 1 percent of American adults.

What "denaturalize" actually means

This is not a word to skip past. Denaturalization is the government going to court to cancel a citizenship it already granted.

For most of modern history, that almost never happened. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Afroyim v. Rusk that Congress "has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof." In plain English: you are a citizen until you decide you're not. The government doesn't get to take it back because it doesn't like you.

That ruling held for decades. Now it's being tested. In June 2025, the Justice Department made denaturalization one of the top five enforcement priorities for its civil division, telling its lawyers to "prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law." DOJ chose to bring those cases as civil lawsuits, not criminal ones. That matters a lot: in a civil case you're not entitled to a lawyer, and the government has a lower bar to clear.

One law professor who studies denaturalization told NPR that because so few people actually fit the government's stated priorities, "if they're really intending maximal enforcement, I think what they're going to end up doing is focusing on people who have not committed any serious infraction, or maybe any infraction at all."

That's the machine that already exists. Clyde's contribution was to tell it who to point at: Muslims.

Then he did it to a sitting state senator

Two months later, Clyde showed everyone exactly how he'd use it.

On May 15, 2026, he posted about Saddam Azlan Salim — a Virginia state senator, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Bangladesh, and an elected official in a state Clyde does not represent. Clyde wrote:

"Saddam Azlan Salim, who immigrated from Bangladesh, authored Virginia's new unconstitutional gun ban. Attempting to naturalize those who hold beliefs that are incompatible with our Constitution is a recipe for disaster — in this case, disarmament. Denaturalize. Deport. Defend 2A."

Stop and look at what the argument actually is. A sitting American lawmaker wrote a gun bill. A congressman from another state decided that writing that bill proved he held "beliefs that are incompatible with our Constitution" — and that the fix was to cancel his citizenship and remove him from the country.

That is punishing an American for how he voted. There is no version of that idea that stops with one person.

Virginia Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi — who grew up in Statesboro, Georgia, went to Georgia Southern, and got her Ph.D. at Emory — answered Clyde in his own hometown paper. She called his post "a vile, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim attack" and pointed out something Clyde apparently never checked: Salim didn't even write the bill. The actual author of Senate Bill 749 was Sen. Creigh Deeds — who, as Hashmi put it, "was born in Richmond, Virginia; he is neither an immigrant nor a Muslim." She asked whether Clyde would have said the same thing about Deeds. "I suspect not."

Hashmi also wrote about why words like Clyde's aren't harmless. Three days after his post, on May 18, two teenage gunmen opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing security guard Amin Abdullah and two mosque members, Mansour Kaziha and Nadir Awad. A school with roughly 150 children sat next door. Police investigated it as a hate crime.

The Constitution he actually cares about

Here's the part Georgians should sit with.

Andrew Clyde talks about the Constitution constantly — when it's about guns. He owns gun stores. He was the member who first asked for the gun provision in Trump's big tax bill, the one that would have pulled silencers out of the National Firearms Act. "Burdensome regulations and unconstitutional taxes shouldn't stand in the way of protecting American gun owners' hearing," he said at the time. The final law cut the federal tax on suppressors from $200 to $0 — a tax break for the industry he sells into.

So he knows the word "unconstitutional." He uses it to make himself money.

But the First Amendment — the one that says the government can't treat you differently because of your religion — apparently doesn't get the same respect. Neither does the 14th Amendment, the one the Supreme Court said makes citizenship permanent. Clyde signed "Denaturalize. Deport. Defend 2A." with a straight face, as if defending one part of the Bill of Rights required shredding another.

A man who reads the Constitution closely enough to find a tax cut for silencers in it can't have missed the part about religious freedom. He just decided it doesn't apply to everybody.

This fits a pattern

Clyde's record on who counts as a full American is long, and it's on the House roll calls:

• He was one of only 14 members to vote against making Juneteenth a federal holiday — and the only member of Georgia's entire delegation to vote no.
• He was one of just three members of the whole House to vote against the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which passed 422–3.
• He single-handedly turned his party against naming a federal courthouse for Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, the first Black judge on a federal appeals court in the Deep South — a bill Florida's two Republican senators had sponsored.
• He offered an amendment to put a Confederate memorial back up at Arlington National Cemetery. It lost 192–230, with 24 Republicans voting against him.

"Denaturalize, deport, repeat" isn't a slip of the thumb. It's the same worldview, applied to a new group.

Nobody in his party stopped him

Republican leaders had months to do something. They did nothing.

At the House GOP retreat in March, Speaker Mike Johnson said he'd talked with members about "our tone and our message" — then explained the rhetoric away, saying "there's a lot of energy in the country, and a lot of popular sentiment, that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem." Later that month he added that "we should never disclaim whole groups of people," and, "Obviously, we love Muslim people." No consequences followed for anyone.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, made the obvious point about the double standard: the Constitution "guarantees religious freedom to everyone in our nation, including American Muslims." He noted that if a member of Congress had said Jews don't belong in America, "that politician would rightfully face condemnation and censure."

Clyde is still in Congress. He is still posting.

Meanwhile, back home

While Clyde was telling the country which Americans should lose their citizenship, here's what he was doing for his own district.

In July 2026 he put out a statement on ICE operations in Athens, calling ICE agents "American heroes" and saying they are "welcome in Athens — and every Georgia community."

And he still won't face the people who elected him. In March 2025, more than 100 Northeast Georgia residents filled the Gainesville square outside his district office asking for a town hall. Ten days later, about 50 came back and chanted "why do you hide Andrew Clyde" for an hour.

He has time to post about deporting American citizens. He doesn't have time to stand in a room in Gainesville and answer a question.

The bottom line

Every American gets the same Bill of Rights. That's the whole deal. You don't have to like your neighbor's religion, and your neighbor doesn't have to like yours, and neither of you can be thrown out of the country over it.

Andrew Clyde looked at that deal and said: not for Muslims. Then he said it again about a duly elected American who wrote a bill he disagreed with.

A representative who would strip citizenship over faith or over a vote isn't a threat to Muslims alone. He's a threat to the idea that any of our citizenship is secure. Once it's something the government can take away from someone else for the wrong beliefs, it's something the government can take away from you.

Georgia's 9th District votes this November.

Source

Noah Lanard, "Republican Islamophobia Has Reached Shocking New Levels," Mother Jones, April 3, 2026. Illustration: Mother Jones.