When Maria Teresa Kumar was nine years-old, she became a citizen of the United States along with her mom. The pair had immigrated from Bogota, Columbia, after her mother fell in love with and married an English teacher working there.
The new family then moved to Sonoma, California. “I just remember feeling so grateful,” she recalls today about going to San Francisco City Hall for her citizenship ceremony.
That’s why it hit so hard when Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced earlier this year that it had created an official section in its immigration office to “strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants”, according to the New York Times.