Most Americans assume there’s a clear-cut line between legal immigrants and unauthorized immigrants; between noncitizens and citizens; between immigrants who have been naturalized and citizens who were born here.

The Trump administration often sparks outrage for doing things that appear to cross those lines: arresting unauthorized immigrants at their green-card interviews; starting an effort to comb old naturalization applications for fraud, in an effort labeled a “denaturalization task force” by the press; and, now, questioning the citizenship of people who have lived for decades as native-born US citizens.

But in all of these cases, the administration isn’t crossing an unprecedented bright line. It’s exploiting places where the boundaries between categories are murkier — often by building on what past administrations had already done. (It wasn’t the Trump administration that collected a list of “suspicious” midwives, for example.)

Generally, these boundary areas are where immigration officials show the most caution. They have discretion in who they pursue and who they don’t — at the margins, they’re most likely to use their discretion to show sympathy to people who’ve been living in the US and have roots here, even if they could be more aggressive in trying to push them out.

It’s possible that the government has changed its policy across the board on birth certificates issued by midwives or other “suspicious” practitioners — or even for people born in the US to non-US citizens more broadly — though there’s no evidence for that

Among the distinctions of John McCain's political life was being targeted by one of the ugliest smear campaigns in memory.

Now, courtesy of Republican operatives tied to House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Democratic House candidate is giving the late Arizona senator competition even as the nation mourns him.

For McCain, it was flyers and phone calls to South Carolina voters suggesting he fathered a dark-skinned child whom he and his wife Cindy actually adopted from Bangladesh after she was orphaned. For Abigail Spanberger, it is a groundless suggestion of ties to terrorism when actually she spent eight years as a CIA counterterrorism agent.

The attack on Spanberger, now challenging GOP Rep. Dave Brat in Virginia's 7th District, involved three extraordinary steps.

The first appeared to start with routine opposition research. A Republican consulting firm asked the government for Spanberger's personnel records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Ian M. Smith, a Department of Homeland Security analyst who resigned this week after he was confronted about his ties to white nationalist groups, attended multiple immigration policy meetings at the White House, according to government officials familiar with his work.

Smith quit his job Tuesday after being questioned about personal emails he sent and received between 2014 and 2016, before he joined the Trump administration. The messages, obtained by the Atlantic and detailed in a report published Tuesday, depict Smith engaging in friendly, casual conversations with prominent white supremacists and racists.

In one email from 2015, Smith responded to a group dinner invitation whose host said his home would be “judenfrei,” a German word used by the Nazis during World War II to describe territory that had been “cleansed” of Jews during the Holocaust.

State District Judge Scott Jenkins on Thursday denied Alex Jones’ request to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of a child killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, a lawyer for the family said.

Jenkins issued the order before this afternoon’s hearing on Jones’ request to dismiss a similar lawsuit, lawyer Mark Bankston said.

“I’m expecting an appeal, but we’ll see in the next 30 days,” Bankston said.

Jenkins also declined to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged that he was erroneously identified on a Jones-related website as the shooter at a Parkland, Fla., high school attack that left 17 dead in February. In that case, however, the judge dismissed Jones as a defendant, Bankston said.