Trump administration targets Americans in ‘first wave’ of denaturalization push: report

The Trump administration is dramatically increasing efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, identifying an initial 384 individuals for denaturalization as the “first wave” of cases. 

To handle this surge, the Justice Department is assigning civil litigators across 39 regional offices to file these cases, shifting resources away from other areas like healthcare fraud.

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The prime revelation is that it is an unusual push for several reasons. Denaturalization is rare and typically reserved for cases where an individual committed fraud during the immigration process or committed specific qualifying crimes. 

Furthermore, these cases are now being handled by civil litigators in regional offices, rather than by attorneys who specialize specifically in immigration.

“The Department of Justice is laser-focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process. Under the leadership of President Trump and Acting Attorney Todd Blanche, the Department is pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history, thanks to close partnerships.”

“We are moving at warp speed to ensure fraudsters are held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent. Our filed referrals in one year have exceeded the total during the entire four years of the Biden administration, with many more to come.”

According to research, this represents a substantial surge in such cases; for context the government brought only 305 denaturalization cases in between 1990 and 2017. 

Most immigrants undergo a rigorous process to obtain citizenship, which includes the requirement to pass a naturalization test. 

However, in recent months, the Trump administration has filed cases against several individuals, including a marine accused of a sex-crime.

As reported by The Times, the cases include an Argentine man accused of falsely claiming a different nationality and a Nigerian man convicted of tax fraud. 

While the US has a long history of denaturalization-targeting activists and labor leaders in the 20th century-the practice shifted to focusing primarily on war criminals, such Nazis who concealed their pasts to gain citizenship. 

In December, the Trump administration directed USCIS to refer between 100 and 200 cases for potential denaturalization per month. 

These efforts originally grew under the Obama administration, but the first Trump administration significantly amplified them by beginning a review of 700,000 files.