Amid Trump-Musk spat, Tesla CEO's immigration status under scanner. Can President deport him?
Former White House official Steve Bannon has urged US President Donald Trump to investigate Elon Musk's immigration status, deport him 'immediately". Bannon, a known vocal critic of
Elon Musk
, requested Trump to 'seize' his company SpaceX, amid the war of words between the world's richest man and the commander in chief.
Bannon urged the president to immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to take control of Musk's rocket company in response to the billionaire entrepreneur's declaration that he would decommission the SpaceX craft used to shuttle astronauts back and forth from the International Space Station (ISS).
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Deport 'illegal alien' Elon Musk and 'seize SpaceX': Trump ally Steve Bannon demands probe into Tesla CEO's immigration status
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'The action that President Trump should be taking immediately, I think, is when [Musk] threatens to take one of the big programs out of Space X, President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the Defense Production Act to be called in on SpaceX and seize SpaceX tonight, before midnight,' Bannon said on his 'War Room' podcast.
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Could Trump deport Elon Musk?
Musk had been one of closest allies of Donald Trump over the past few months and had spent nearly $300 million to support him and other Republicans during the 2024 presidential election. He voiced his support on his social media platform X and was picked by the President to lead a newly created department DOGE aimed at downsizing federal government and slash spending. He left DOGE at the end of May as his tenure of 'special government employee' got over.
But in the past week, things took a U-turn and this relationship unraveled after Musk launched an all-out attack on President Trump's 'big, beautiful bill'. Things escalated further and Musk has now suggested Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vice President JD Vance, while the president suggested Musk's companies could lose government contracts potentially imperiling SpaceX's relationship with NASA.
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Amid the public fallout of Musk and Trump, Steve Bannon, prominent conservative commentator Bannon, told New York Times, "They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately."
Bannon later doubled down on this argument during an appearance on his War Room podcast when he said: "Elon Musk is illegal, and he's got to go. He's illegal? Deport immediately."
"You're going to ship these other people home. Let's start with the South Africans, OK?"
Elon Musk's citizenship saga
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Elon Musk relocated to Canada in 1989 before moving to the United States in 1992 to study at the University of Pennsylvania. After spending several years living and working in the US, he became a naturalized citizen in 2002. The US law says that the citizenship gained through naturalization can be revoked if it was "procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation."
In October, 2024, the Washington Post published an article claiming that Musk had previously "worked illegally in the United States" by setting up a company while on a student visa in 1995, despite never enrolling in Stanford University as promised.
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Citing 'former business associates, court records, and internal company documents,' the publication reported that Elon Musk entered the US on a J-1 student visa. Musk then started working on a startup — which later evolved into Zip2 — without holding the necessary work authorization.
The Washington Post also referenced a 2005 email, presented in a defamation lawsuit, in which Musk acknowledged he applied to Stanford University primarily because he otherwise had 'no legal right to stay in the country.'
The case was raised at a campaign event by then President Joe Biden who said: "That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be [an] illegal worker here when he was here.
"I'm serious. He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He wasn't in school. He was violating the law. He's talking about all these illegals coming our way?"
In a post on X shortly after the Post's story was published Musk denied the allegation against him, saying: "I was in fact allowed to work in the US"
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Speaking to Wired about Musk, Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert at Cornell Law School, said that if the claims of illegal working are true "on purely legal grounds, this would justify revoking citizenship, because if he had told the truth, he would not have been eligible for an H1-B, a green card, or naturalization."
Amanda Frost, a legal expert at the University of Virginia, said: "If a noncitizen violated the terms of a nonimmigrant visa, and then adjusted to immigrant (green card) status without admitting the violation, and then naturalized without admitting the violation, that person could be denaturalized on the ground that their naturalization was 'illegally procured."
Musk vs Trump explodes
In a series of sharp attacks on Friday, Elon Musk called for President Donald Trump to be impeached, mocked Trump's so-called 'Big Beautiful [spending] Bill' by labeling it 'The Big Ugly Bill,' and warned that Trump's tariff policies could push the U.S. into a recession in the second half of 2025.
Trump responded on his Truth Social platform, claiming Musk had 'just gone CRAZY,' and added: 'The easiest way to save money in our Budget—Billions and Billions of Dollars—is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!'
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'Without me, Trump would have lost election': Elon Musk launches all-out attack on US President
As tensions escalated, Musk posted: 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.'
However, Musk did not provide any evidence to support the explosive claim. While Trump's name has appeared in previously released court documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, he has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and there's no proof he is named in any unreleased files.
Whether the Trump-Musk feud will continue—and if it will impact policy decisions—remains to be seen. Trump has not suggested investigating Musk's American citizenship, and according to Politico, the two are still expected to speak on Friday.
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