WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is ramping up its plans to revoke the citizenship of immigrants who’ve committed crimes or pose a national security risk, according to a recent memo underscoring the Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda.
Efforts to identity and go after those suspected of cheating to get their citizenship are not new to this administration.
But the public push is raising concerns from advocates, who have accused the administration of trying to use immigration enforcement for political purposes. It’s receiving increased scrutiny after a Republican member of Congress suggested that Zohran Mamdani, the New York City Democratic mayoral candidate, should be subject to denaturalization proceedings.
Here’s a look at the denaturalization process and what the Justice Department’s memo means:
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Denaturalization cases are rare
The U.S. government can strip a naturalized immigrant of their citizenship if they are criminally convicted of naturalization fraud or if the government proves through civil proceedings that they illegally obtained their citizenship through fraud or misrepresented or concealed facts on their application.
For years, the government’s denaturalization efforts focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis. The Justice Department filed just more than 300 total cases between 1990 and 2017.
An initiative that began under the Obama administration called Operation Janus expanded those efforts by seeking to identify people who had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.
In 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.
The first Trump administration made such investigations a bigger priority, creating a Justice Department section focused on denaturalization cases.
But even then, the number of denaturalization cases remained small, as the administration didn’t have the resources to bring many amid an onslaught of legal challenges to immigration policies it had to defend against, said Matthew Hoppock, an attorney in Kansas who represents people in denaturalization cases.
Justice Department says it will prioritize certain cases
The push was announced in a memo from the recently confirmed head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate. Shumate said the cases the department will prioritize include people who “pose a potential danger to national security,” people who commit violent crimes, members of gangs and drug cartels and people who commit Medicaid fraud and other types of fraud.
The benefits of the denaturalization process, Shumate wrote, “include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport.”
Hoppock said the memo sort of “blows the doors open” for the administration to file as many as many denaturalization cases as it has the resources to file.
Lawyers raise alarm about the potential impact
The broad language in the memo raises the prospect “that any offense, at any time, may be used to justify denaturalization,” said Christopher Wellborn, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
“It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the government invokes unsubstantiated claims of gang affiliation or uses an individual’s criminal record to claim that citizenship was illegally procured,” Wellborn said in a statement.
Others worry the administration’s public push will stoke fear among naturalized immigrants.
“The more you talk about it, the more you frame it as ‘we’re coming after your naturalization, we’re coming after you,’ the more of a chilling effect we see on people applying for naturalization,” said Elizabeth Taufa, senior policy attorney and strategist at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “Even those folks that really are eligible for naturalization.”
Critics have accused the Trump administration using immigration enforcement to go after people because of their speech — most notably in the case of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, whom it has sought to deport over his role in pro-Palestinian protests.
“One of our ongoing concerns is will they target these politically, will they start combing through people’s immigration files if they don’t like you or if they think you don’t agree with the government,” Hoppock said.
“I think most Americans would support the idea of stripping someone of citizenship if they got it through fraud and they are also a dangerous person,” he said, but the concern is if they start going through “regular folks’ immigration files to find a T that is not crossed or an I that is not dotted so they can use it as a weapon.”
Justice Department recently secured denaturalization in one case
The department last month announced that it had successfully secured the denaturalization of a man who was convicted of possessing child sexual abuse material.
The British man had become a U.S. citizen after enlisting in the U.S. Army under a provision that provides a pathway to citizenship for U.S. service members, officials said. He only listed a speeding ticket when asked on his naturalization application if he had “ever committed a crime or offense for which you were not arrested,” and he became a U.S. citizen in 2013.
Months later, he was arrested in Louisiana on child sexual abuse material charges and convicted, according to the department.
“The laws intended to facilitate citizenship for brave men and women who join our nation’s armed forces will not shield individuals who have fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship by concealing their crimes,” Shumate said in a statement at the time. “If you commit serious crimes before you become a U.S. citizen and then lie about them during your naturalization process, the Justice Department will discover the truth and come after you.”
