Trump’s crackdown upended one immigrant’s life. This month he finally became a citizen 38%
By Ko Lyn Cheang0%
7/17/2026, 11:00:00 AM
Topics: U S Citizenship And Immigration Services, Goodwill, National Guard, Congress, Save The Children, Sfo, Yar Zar Min, Kenny Kruse, Donald Trump, John J Mcconnell Jr, Coco, Buddhist, United States, Myanmar, Castro District, California, Bulgaria, San Francisco, Burmese, D C, Thailand, Rhode Island, Cambodia, Mexican, Indian, Africa, Seattle, Law And Government, Government, Visa And Immigration, Crime, Law, Political Issues And Policy, Bay Area, Politics, US And World, U S And World
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Appeal to Authority, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 12% saturation with 141 hits. Analysis detected 1,733 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,175 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 44.3% and a BS Rank of 38% (10,803 of 17,397 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.10% of the article peer group.
Yar Zar Min took one last look at the apartment he shared in San Francisco’s Castro district with his husband, slung the Goodwill navy blazer over his arm and said bye to his dog, Coco.
If all went well, by the time he returned home that day, he’d be a bona fide American citizen.
“I’m excited, but I’m also very nervous,” said Yar Zar Min, who goes by his full name in accordance with Burmese naming customs.
“Because there’s always something that comes up.”
The 38-year-old had been here before, on the edge of finally getting to enjoy all the rights and privileges associated with U.S. citizenship until an eleventh-hour policy change dashed his hopes.
In December, eight days before his citizenship ceremony, he received a letter stating it had been canceled.
He’d felt so defeated that he felt numb.
Yar Zar Min was one of many people from 19 countries whom the Trump administration had indefinitely suspended from receiving immigration benefits in December in response to the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., by a man who’d been granted asylum.
The federal government later expanded the list to 39 countries, preventing immigrants who’d followed legal processes to apply for asylum, visas, green cards and citizenship from receiving final decisions on their applications.
It also subjected decisions about immigration applications from previous years to “re-review.”
U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services had justified the policies by stating in a memo that “the United States has seen what a lack of screening, vetting, and prioritizing expedient adjudications can do to the American people.”
The agency added that “a comprehensive re-review, potential interview, and re-interview of all aliens from high-risk countries of concern who entered the United States on or after January 20, 2021 is necessary.”
Then in June, a federal judge in Rhode Island struck down these policies, lambasting USCIS for having “neither ‘followed the law’ nor ‘done things the right way, violating ‘the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering.’”
“USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth,” Judge John J.
McConnell Jr. wrote.
He ordered the agency to resume processing immigration applications and holding naturalization ceremonies.
Barely a month after the judge’s ruling, the good news arrived.
Yar Zar Min’s husband, Kenny Kruse, 40, was walking Coco when he saw the postman deliver mail.
He rushed to find a letter inviting Yar Zar Min to his naturalization oath ceremony on July 14.
He excitedly texted his husband, who was at the coffee shop where he worked.
The couple had navigated a military coup, global pandemic and byzantine U.S. immigration system to be together.
When they first met in Myanmar in 2016 through a dating app, Kruse was training teachers at a monastic Buddhist orphanage and school.
Yar Zar Min had left his hometown, where his parents were street food sellers, to pursue a dream of humanitarian work for an international nonprofit called Save the Children.
They quickly connected over their shared convictions.
But just six months into dating, Kruse had to leave Myanmar.
Kruse had raised the alarm about reports of clerical sexual abuse of children at the school where he worked.
He said he started noticing people following him home, filming him.
He received subtle threats from anonymous callers to stop meddling.
His friends were similarly called and questioned about his whereabouts.
Kruse felt even more unsafe as a gay man in Myanmar, where same-sex sexual activity is criminalized.
“I felt like everything was falling apart and he was a rock,” Kruse said, referring to Yar Zar Min.
Kruse eventually went to Cambodia and Thailand, kickstarting a long-distance relationship that wouldn’t end until Yar Zar Min finally came to the U.S. on a fiancé visa in 2021.
Applying for the visa was an ordeal, the couple said, involving Yar Zar Min traveling to at least seven townships across Myanmar to obtain police letters vouching that he had no serious criminal history.
His visa was finally approved on Jan.
29, 2021.
Two days later, the military in Myanmar launched a coup and seized control of the capital.
The Myanmar military shut down phones and the internet.
Unable to reach his fiancé, Kruse sobbed uncontrollably.
When they finally made contact, numerous flight cancellations meant it took weeks before Yar Zar Min could get on a plane to San Francisco.
The couple were reunited at San Francisco International Airport on Feb.
26, 2021.
Kruse brought red roses.
Over the next few years, Yar Zar Min’s marriage-based green card application made its slow way through the system.
The couple saw obtaining U.S. citizenship as the only way to ensure they could never be separated again.
But after President Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, he issued a travel ban barring nationals from 19 countries, including Myanmar.
Although green card holders were technically excluded, the couple’s attorney advised against international travel.
Yar Zar Min had read about green card holders getting their legal status revoked and Burmese immigrants being deported to Africa.
The couple canceled a Thanksgiving visit to Kruse’s parents in Seattle.
They put off long-awaited plans to do a big trip for Kruse’s 40th birthday to Bulgaria, where Kruse’s sister-in-law is from.
“We will make it,” Yar Zar Min said they’d tell themselves.
After his citizenship oath ceremony was canceled in December, Yar Zar Min sued the U.S. government.
The case was pending when the federal judge blocked the immigration ban suspension, and his citizenship oath ceremony was scheduled.
On the day of Yar Zar Min’s citizenship oath ceremony, the couple lined up on the sidewalk outside the USCIS field office alongside dozens of others set to be naturalized that day.
They made small talk with a Mexican woman and an Indian man whose ceremonies had also been canceled for unknown reasons.
“It was awesome to see such a diverse group of people becoming citizens,” Kruse said.
An officer led them inside, where Kruse kept half-expecting the agency to interrupt and say there was a mistake.
“We will believe it’s actually happening when he has the certificate in hand,” Kruse said.
As his husband recited his oath of allegiance, Kruse held back tears.
By the next day, Yar Zar Min had applied for a passport so that he could soon travel to Thailand to reunite with his family members, whom he hadn’t seen in two years.
He’s looking forward to making a difference by casting his first vote as a U.S. citizen in November.
Recently, he’s been worried that the U.S. was barreling toward authoritarianism, seeing similarities between the current political climate and the Myanmar of his childhood under a military dictatorship.
“I just want to say to Americans,” he said, “it’s not a joke.
It will get worse.”
But despite everything he’s been through, Yar Zar Min said, “I still have hope that the U.S. is the land of freedom.”
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