A former high-ranking White House official flagged a "concerning line" in President Donald Trump's expanded test for U.S. citizenship.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that officers will be required to give more than a "cursory" review focused on an "absence of wrongdoing" and instead focus on probing the "good moral character" of prospective citizens, which a former Joe Biden deputy highlighted as problematic.

"The concerning line in there, as well, was 'adherence to societal norms,'" said Daniel Koh, who served as Biden's deputy assistant and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. "This is a president and MAGA larger has been trying to redefine what it means to be an American."

"On CNBC President Trump reacted to 1.7 million foreign-born workers losing their jobs as a good thing," Koh added. "He is indicating that if you were born outside of this country, you can never truly be American. [Conservative pundit] Matt Walsh did the same thing, implying that New York, 40 percent foreign-born, means that New York isn't an American city anymore. That's what should concern people, the subjective nature of this criteria."

Republican strategist Matt Gorman downplayed the concerns, saying the government had always imposed some criteria for granting citizenship.

"This has been part of the law since 1790, so this is not something that is all of a sudden new," Gorman said, "and some of the things that the memo list is family caregiving, community involvement, scholastic achievement – things we should be applauding."

Host Audie Cornish pointed out that those weren't among the changes under discussion, but Gorman pressed on.

"Again, but discretion is always in these sorts of things," he said. "We have always taken this into account, right, whether it's scholarships or how we determine punishments for crime. There's always a measure of subjectivity when it comes to this sort of thing. Good moral character, and, look, at the at the at its core, what it comes down to is that coming to this country and settling, whether it's a green card or some sort of permanent legal status, is a privilege, it is something to be attained. It is truly wonderful to be an American. It is not something we take lightly, and it is candidly not just something we should give away willy-nilly. It is a privilege."

Jerusalem Demsas, founder and editor of The Argument, argued that Gorman was missing the point.

"I agree that, of course, we should have standards for who we're giving immigration papers to," she said. "We already do have standards and they are quite rigorous. Like, my family went through the exact same thing when we came here, and I think it's what's interesting here is the the debate between the literal thing that's happening and the concern about the discretion and how it's going to be used."

"I don't think anyone would disagree that you would want people with good moral character coming into the United States," Demsas added. "The concern is, are you going to use this to purge people because they simply have a different view than you about Palestinian statehood, even if that is not an anti-American view. Many Americans believe in Palestinian statehood, and they've pointed that out. It's not antisemitic to believe that."

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