The extraordinary step of stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship used to be reserved for individuals who turned out to be war criminals, genocide perpetrators, threats to national security, violent felons or, during the Cold War, communists.
But under President Donald Trump’s administration, something as mundane as under-reporting income on a tax return could mean you are no longer a US citizen.
Last month, in an extension of Trump’s immigration crackdown, the Justice Department made denaturalization one of five enforcement priorities for the agency’s Civil Division. The unit will now look at individuals in any of 10 priority areas, along with the catch-all of “any other cases” the agency determines “sufficiently important to pursue.”
Trump and senior officials in his administration have raised the prospect of stripping citizenship from
“Denaturalization has always been in the books. It’s always been a tool of enforcement that the government had for years,” said Patricia Corrales, an attorney who prosecuted denaturalization cases in the Justice Department under the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. “But the difference between denaturalization under Trump’s administrations and prior administrations is the priority that they place on the kind of denaturalization cases.”
Denaturalization remains extremely rare, but the number of cases filed in court sharply increased during Trump’s first term. At least 90 civil and criminal cases were filed in 2018, more than twice the average number of cases during the Bush and Obama administrations. Among those, nearly twice as many civil cases, which are easier to win in court, were filed in 2018 than in any year under Obama, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Law.
The push to denaturalize under Trump even surpassed previous record years in 2001 and 2002, when a federal court ruled officials could no longer use administrative methods for stripping someone of citizenship. Previous spikes in denaturalization prosecutions, notably under Bush and Obama, focused on individuals who committed violent crimes or used false identities to acquire citizenship.
The DOJ has always enjoyed discretionary powers in choosing who to investigate, but the new directive on how to prioritize new cases goes well beyond the scope of what previous administrations pursued, said Margy O’Herron, a former senior advisor to President Joe Biden on immigration and senior counsel who oversaw immigration related cases at the Justice Department.
“The lack of focused priorities allows the government to target any naturalized citizen it decides it doesn’t like,” O’Herron said.
Critics contend that using denaturalization law in this manner could end up serving political ends and keeping potential newcomers from pursuing US citizenship at all.
“The idea that naturalization could become a tool to threaten people with, to say that you’re not American like anybody else, I think it eats at the heart of what it means to be an American,” said Rep.
New Priorities
In April, before the new DOJ guidelines came out, Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a web portal to track criminal proceedings against naturalized citizens they say hid crimes that would have barred them from obtaining citizenship.
It lists nine people who were convicted of child sexual abuse, a sex trafficker, a war criminal, and a Nigerian man who took part in an $80 million international scam. All lost their bids to gain citizenship or were retroactively denaturalized.
It didn’t list Vanessa Ben.
In March, more than five years after the Houston grandmother pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return, prosecutors asked a court to strip her of her citizenship.
Ben, who worked as an accountant, had gone through a years-long process to obtain citizenship, culminating in a series of interviews with immigration officials in 2017 and 2018 where she was grilled to determine whether she met the standard of being of “good moral character.”
Like the nearly 8 million other people naturalized in the past decade, Ben was asked broad questions, including whether she had ever committed a crime, even one she was never charged with. According to court documents, she answered “no,” and was granted citizenship soon after.
Then, in 2019, Ben was charged with tax fraud. She pleaded guilty to filing a fraudulent tax return before she became a citizen; she had underreported income and ended up with a $7,712 refund. She agreed to pay the IRS a fine, and was sentenced to 12 months in prison.
DOJ is now seeking to strip her of citizenship for allegedly covering up that she had filed a false tax return, even though at the time she hadn’t been charged with that crime. Ben’s federal public defender and her family declined to comment, citing her upcoming trial in Houston.
Determining why denaturalization cases are pursued can be difficult because many cases are filed under seal in court. But pursuing cases over relatively minor tax fraud and other lesser, non-violent crimes is exceptionally rare, said former officials and attorneys who have defended clients in denaturalization cases.
DOJ spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre maintained that denaturalization “will only be pursued as permitted by law and supported by evidence against individuals who illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process.”
“This Department of Justice is committed to maintaining the integrity of the naturalization program,” she said in a statement. “Those who gain citizenship through unlawful means and endanger our national security will not maintain the benefits of being an American citizen.”
Groups like the Immigrant Defense Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers have told attorneys to take note of their clients’ citizenship status, as well as when they acquired citizenship, before considering how to plead to new charges that could open them up to denaturalization.
Corrales, the attorney and former prosecutor, said clients are worried that things as simple as a traffic ticket could upend their lives in the US.
“The most important advice I can offer your readers, whether naturalized citizens or any other immigrant status, is to seek the advice of an experienced immigration attorney before pleading to any charges,” said Gintare Grigaite, an attorney who has successfully defended such denaturalization cases in the past.
Legal Standards
Citizens can be denaturalized in a civil case under 8 USC 1451, which deals with “concealment” or “willful misrepresentation” of a “material fact” that would have otherwise precluded someone from becoming a citizen. This law also allows for stripping someone of citizenship if, within five years of being naturalized, they become affiliated with a terrorist group.
Officials can also use 18 USC 1425, which makes it a criminal offense to acquire or attempt to acquire citizenship by lying about a material fact. Individuals must be charged within 10 years of filing the form or attending the interview where they lied about one of these material facts. They get a jury trial, in which the government must prove its case “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Civil denaturalization, which DOJ prosecutors were directed to expand, has no statute of limitations and doesn’t involve a jury trial. Defendants don’t have the right to an attorney and the government’s standard of proof is slightly lower than that in a criminal case– “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt.”
In some cases, the children or spouses of someone who loses their citizenship can also be denaturalized. Individuals who naturalized because they served in the US military can also lose their citizenship if they are found to be violating these provisions within five years after they became citizens.
“We have used denaturalization very sparingly over the years, largely in cases of war criminals,” said Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border adviser under Biden. “Any kind of concerted push to strip people of their citizenship at scale would really be ahistorical, and concerning.”
Expanded scope, guardrails
Congress provided the Trump administration with more than $150 billion for immigration enforcement and border security earlier this month. Though the funding doesn’t specifically go toward denaturalization, agency leaders could draw from more generic areas, including a $10 billion allocation for DHS to secure borders.
“The massive infusion of resources could impact and scale up a practice that was used very rarely,” said Andrea Flores, a National Security Council immigration adviser under Biden and a former Senate aide.
Trump has a playbook to follow from his first term, when he launched a dedicated section in the DOJ for denaturalization. He also directed the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security to supercharge an Obama-era initiative called Operation Janus to root out fraud in past citizenship applications. Around 315,000 people were investigated for allegedly using false identities to acquire citizenship, but only around 100 cases were filed in court, a reflection of the resources needed to prosecute such cases.
Critics say the new policies open the door to pursue cases for political reasons, based on provisions that were meant to screen out those with ties to anti-government groups or terror organizations.
Corrales, the former DOJ prosecutor, cited the citizenship application’s question of whether applicants were involved in groups focused on subverting governments.
“If you were in a gang in El Salvador and you were creating havoc against your own government, then you should have said yes to that, right?” she said. “Even if you’re here in the United States, even if you’ve been a good boy…Well, that would be a basis to denaturalize you.”
Leading conservative voices, including Mike Davis, co-founder of the Article III Project, have called for denaturalizing individuals, including journalists and protesters, for their statements allegedly showing support for Hamas.
Last month, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a civil denaturalization case against Mamdani on the grounds that he lied while going through the naturalization process. “If Mr. Mamdani concealed relevant associations, that concealment may constitute a material misrepresentation sufficient to support denaturalization under federal law,” Ogles wrote.
Mamdani became a US citizen in 2018. In a 2017 song, he spoke in favor of five men convicted of financing Hamas whose trial has been criticized by groups like Human Rights Watch.
The song was uncovered by Canary Mission, an anonymous group that has put together a database of academics and other personalities it says espoused anti-semitic views. At a trial in Boston this month challenging deportations of students over anti-semitic views, the DHS admitted it was consulting the group’s database as part of its effort to identify subjects to investigate.
Those kinds of affiliations were the basis of mass denaturalizations in the first half of the 20th century, when some 22,000 people were stripped of citizenship between 1907 and 1967. Courts have curtailed those practices since. In 2001 a federal injunction stripped immigration officials of the power to denaturalize someone administratively, and in 2017 the Supreme Court ruled minor facts that were misrepresented by citizenship applicants couldn’t be the basis for denaturalization prosecutions.
Denaturalizing individuals based on such affiliations would still need to be done in court, said Matthew Hoppock, an attorney with Hoppock Law Firm, LLC who has defended clients in such cases. “There’s no membership book or oath ceremony or something to be a member. So, the government has to prove these cases, by clear unequivocal and convincing evidence, the standard,” Hoppock said.
Federal courts will serve as an important bulwark against overzealous denaturalization cases, retired immigration law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr said.
“Because denaturalization is so important, because it takes away someone’s citizenship, I would hope that the courts, if faced with issues, would make sure that the statutory requirements are met before someone is actually denaturalized,” he said.
“Although you might have more investigations started,” he added, “I don’t know how many more people will actually be denaturalized.”
The long duration of cases will make it hard to assess the administration’s success rate for years to come. For now, Trump’s critics on Capitol Hill are attempting to serve as a check on the denaturalization efforts. Jayapal, the Washington congresswoman, said Democrats are pushing DOJ for transparency on its plans.
Regardless of what the administration is able to accomplish, the threat of mass denaturalization might have the intended effect of curtailing political activities, said Elizabeth Taufa, senior policy attorney and strategist at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
“With this administration, the point is not necessarily to denaturalize as many people as possible. That might be the underlying goal, but the bigger goal here is the chilling effect that it has on naturalization,” Taufa said. “People think that if I just don’t come forward, I just sort of, stay back, then I’m not going to be at risk.”
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