Justice Department Files 12 Denaturalization Cases Against Naturalized Americans
The Justice Department moved against 12 naturalized citizens at once, a sharp escalation in a tool rarely used against the 24.5 million naturalized Americans in the U.S.
The Justice Department has reopened one of the government’s sharpest citizenship tools, filing denaturalization actions in federal district courts against 12 naturalized Americans accused of serious crimes ranging from terrorist support and war crimes to espionage, sexual abuse of a minor and immigration fraud.
The cases, announced May 8, spanned immigrants from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan. The department said citizenship can be revoked only when it was illegally procured or obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation, a legal threshold that keeps denaturalization tied to fraud, not political disagreement. That distinction matters because the government is not simply questioning who a person is; it must show that citizenship itself was unlawfully obtained.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said people who committed fraud, sexual abuse or supported terrorism should never have been naturalized. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate said the department was filing denaturalization actions at record speed, signaling that the administration is treating the power as more than a backstop for the rarest cases. Blanche has also said the government is pursuing more denaturalization cases now than in the last nine years and that only people who illegally obtained citizenship should be worried.
The scale is striking compared with past practice. CBS News reported that the federal government filed just over 300 denaturalization cases between 1990 and 2017, or about 11 a year on average. NBC News reported that the administration had already identified at least 300 foreign-born Americans as possible denaturalization targets and was aiming for 100 to 200 referrals each month in fiscal 2026. If those numbers hold, the current campaign would expand a process that has historically been narrow into one with far broader reach.
Civil liberties advocates see that expansion as the real story. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center has called the drive a scare tactic, arguing that it is meant to make naturalized citizens feel like second-class Americans. The Brennan Center for Justice has noted that the Supreme Court has set a high bar for stripping citizenship and that the practice has a long, often ugly history. More than 22,000 Americans lost citizenship between 1907 and 1967, including during World War I, World War II and the Red Scare, often on political, racial or gender-based grounds.
That history gives the new cases weight far beyond the 12 people named now. With about 24.5 million naturalized Americans in the country, the administration is testing how narrowly denaturalization will remain confined to proven fraud and how far it can stretch as a symbol of state power over citizenship itself.
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