Trump administration pushes DoJ to pursue denaturalization cases – report | Trump administration
The Trump administration is reportedly pressuring the justice department to pursue hundreds of denaturalization cases in which Americans born outside the United States have been stripped of their citizenship.
The Justice Department has already identified 384 foreign-born U.S. citizens whose citizenship it wants to revoke and will begin that process in the coming weeks. New York Times.
The US government may request that the court revoke the citizenship status of people who obtained citizenship status illegally. In some cases, denaturalized individuals are caught lying to authorities or performing a sham marriage. In other cases, people who commit crimes may be stripped of citizenship.
Last year, the justice department filed a memo directing the civil division to target denaturalization of U.S. citizens nationwide, adding a number of categories of people to target. Experts say this opens the door for the Trump administration to continue pursuing its mass deportation agenda.
Because denaturalization is costly and manpower-intensive, the U.S. government rarely pursues denaturalization cases.
At a meeting last week, senior justice department officials told colleagues that civil litigators from 39 regional offices would be assigned to file cases. It is unclear what led the justice department to target 384 people.
Between 2017 and late 2025, the United States stripped more than 120 naturalized citizens of their citizenship, according to the Times. The 384 people they have now identified are just the beginning of the administration’s effort to strip people of their citizenship. Francey Hakes, a senior justice department official, said the 384 people represented the “first wave of cases” they plan to pursue, adding that the effort to strip more people of their citizenship was a “White House initiative.”
A White House spokesman told the Times this was “federal law, not a White House initiative.”
In the United States, when a person is stripped of citizenship, he or she reverts to the status he or she had before becoming a citizen. Immigration is a civil matter, meaning immigrants do not have the right to a lawyer in such cases.
Because of the large amount of manpower required to prosecute many denaturalization cases, other officials from the justice ministry’s civil division may be assigned to handle the job. The Times warns that the initiative could divert resources from other department offices, including those pursuing health care or other fraud cases.
According to the Guardian reported last year, in order for the US government to justify denaturalization, a person must prove before a judge that he or she is not of “good moral character”. Last year’s memo listed a wide range of categories of people who should be stripped of their status, including those accused of having “links to terrorism” or being gang and cartel members.
Experts warned last year that the administration’s rating might be overly broad, given the Trump administration’s track record of falsely accusing immigrants of being gang members based on weak evidence and targeting political activists.
In recent months, the Trump administration has filed denaturalization cases against a number of immigrants, including a sailor accused of a sex crime, an Argentinian man accused of falsely claiming to be another national, and a Nigerian man convicted of tax evasion.
Denaturalization has a long history in the United States. Throughout the 20th century, journalists, activists, and labor leaders were frequently targeted and accused of being anarchists and communists.
Politically motivated denaturalization ended in the late 1960s after the high court ruled that denaturalization could only be done if someone was found to have committed fraud or “willful misrepresentation.” Later, the categories were narrowed and denaturalization later focused mostly on former war criminals, including Nazis who lied on their records to gain U.S. citizenship.
Denaturalization efforts increased during the Obama administration. The first Trump administration then stepped up those efforts, seeking to review 700,000 files.
