Readers send me the same demand every day: deport every Muslim in the United States. Some write a sentence and some write a paragraph, others send videos. It is worth asking what that would take, because the answer sits in the statute books.
Start with who would be affected. Muslims make up about 1 percent of U.S. adults, and 59 percent of Muslim adults were born in another country, according to Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study. That leaves roughly four in ten born here. Pew's summary does not say how many of the foreign-born are citizens, and many people naturalize.
Citizens cannot be deported. The Fourteenth Amendment makes everyone born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, a citizen. In Afroyim v. Rusk, decided in 1967, the Supreme Court held that the government cannot take citizenship away from an American without that person's consent. The federal deportation statute reads differently. It applies to "any alien," and it authorizes removal on the order of the Attorney General when a person falls into one of its listed classes, according to 8 U.S.C. 1227.
Religion is not on that list. The classes cover people who were inadmissible when they entered, who violated the terms of their visas, who were convicted of certain crimes, or who engaged in espionage, terrorism or other threats to national security. A noncitizen Muslim who has broken none of those rules has no ground for removal. The security grounds apply to a person of any faith.
Naturalized citizens are not an exception in practice. The government can pursue denaturalization in limited cases such as fraud in obtaining citizenship, but the Brennan Center describes the legal hurdles as high.
Supporters of tougher limits often point to Trump v. Hawaii. In 2018 the Court voted 5-4 to uphold a proclamation restricting entry for nationals of eight countries, finding it plausibly related to national security and vetting. That case concerned entry from abroad and was based on nationality. The Court did not hold that the government may remove people because of their religion. The First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause protects religious practice, and the Constitution says no religious test shall be required for federal office.