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Denaturalization is back. In 1967, the Supreme Court declared that denaturalization for any reason other than fraud or mistake in the naturalization process is unconstitutional, forcing the government to abandon its aggressive denaturalization campaigns. For the last half century, the government denaturalized no more than a handful of people every year. Over the past year, however, the Trump Administration has revived denaturalization. The Administration has targeted 700,000 naturalized American citizens for investigation and has hired dozens of lawyers and staff members to work in a newly created office devoted to investigating and prosecuting denaturalization cases. Using information gathered from responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, legal filings, and interviews, this Essay is the first to describe the Trump Administration's denaturalization campaign in detail. The Essay then situates denaturalization within the Trump Administration's broader approach to immigration. Under a policy known as "attrition through enforcement," the Trump Administration has sought to discourage immigration and encourage "self-deportation." Although attrition through enforcement is typically described as a method of persuading unauthorized immigrants to leave the United States, the denaturalization campaign and other Trump Administration initiatives suggest that the same approach is now being applied to those with legal status.

The conventional wisdom is that state courts need not follow lower federal court precedent when interpreting federal law. Upon closer inspection, however, the question of how state courts should treat lower federal court precedent is not so clear. Although most state courts now take the conventional approach, a few contend that they are obligated to follow the lower federal courts, and two federal courts of appeals have declared that their decisions are binding on state courts. The Constitution's text and structure send mixed messages about the relationship between state and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never squarely addressed the matter. Remarkably, this significant question about the interplay between the state and federal judicial systems lingers unresolved more than two-hundred years after the Constitution's ratification. This Article uses this question to explore the relationship between state and lower federal courts. As a constitutional matter, it can be argued that state courts were intended to play a subordinate role to the lower federal courts when interpreting federal law, even if they are viewed as equals when it comes to finding facts and applying facts to law. Furthermore, Congress's decision to create the lower federal courts, and then assign them broad federal question jurisdiction, arguably displaces state court authority to interpret federal law independently-particularly in an era in which the Supreme Court lacks the capacity to resolve many of the splits between the federal and state court systems. Finally, as a practical matter, allowing state courts to diverge from lower federal court precedent on matters of federal law can create disruptive intrastate conflicts that lead to forum shopping and can sometimes take years to resolve.