Trump administration pushes DoJ to pursue denaturalization cases – report | Trump administration

The Trump administration is reportedly pushing the Justice Department to pursue hundreds of denaturalization cases, in which Americans born outside the United States are 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 the process in the coming weeks, according to the New York Times.

The U.S. government can ask a court to revoke citizenship status from people who obtained it illegally. In some cases, denaturalized people have been caught lying to authorities or entering into a false marriage. In other cases, perpetrators of crimes may be denaturalized.

Last year, the Justice Department filed a memo directing the Civil Division to target denaturalization of U.S. citizens nationwide and added a number of categories of people who should be targeted. Experts say this allowed the Trump administration to continue its program of mass deportations.

Due to the high cost and labor required to pursue denaturalization, the U.S. government rarely prosecutes denaturalization cases.

At a meeting last week, top Justice Department officials told colleagues that civil litigators from 39 regional offices would be responsible for filing the cases. It’s unclear what exactly prompted the Justice Department to target the 384 people.

Between 2017 and the end of 2025, the United States stripped just over 120 naturalized citizens of their citizenship, according to the Times. Today, the 384 people identified are only the beginning of the denaturalization campaign led by the administration. A senior Justice Department official, Francey Hakes, said the 384 people represent “the first wave of cases” they intend to pursue, adding that the push to denaturalize more people is a “White House initiative.”

A White House spokesperson told the Times that “this is not a White House initiative – it is federal law.”

In the United States, when a person is denaturalized, they regain the status they held before becoming a citizen. Immigration is a civil matter, which means immigrants do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.

Other officials from the Justice Department’s civil division could be delegated to continue this work, due to the amount of manpower it may require to pursue so many denaturalization cases. The Times warns that the move could divert resources from other departments, including those dealing with health care or other types of fraud cases.

According to a Guardian article from last year, the US government must prove that a person does not have “good moral character” in front of a judge to justify denaturalization. Last year’s memo listed a wide range of categories of people who should be stripped of their status, including those accused of having a “terrorism nexus” or individuals accused of being members of gangs and cartels.

Experts warned last year that the administration’s memo could be too broad, given that the Trump administration has falsely accused immigrants of being gang members and targeted political activists, based on flimsy evidence.

In recent months, the Trump administration has filed denaturalization complaints against some immigrants, including a sailor accused of a sex crime, an Argentine accused of falsely claiming to be of another nationality and a Nigerian convicted of tax evasion, according to the Times.

There is a long history of denaturalization in the United States. Throughout the 20th century, journalists, activists and union leaders were often targeted, accused of being anarchists and communists.

Political denaturalization declined in the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court ruled that denaturalization could only occur if a person was found to have committed fraud or “willful misrepresentation.” The categories were later narrowed, with denaturalization focusing primarily on former war criminals, including Nazis, who lied on their records to obtain U.S. citizenship.

Denaturalization efforts intensified under the Obama administration. Later, the first Trump administration ramped up those efforts, attempting to review 700,000 records.