Trump administration seeks to revoke citizenship of 17 naturalized Americans

The Trump administration is preparing to seek the citizenship of 17 naturalized Americans, a move Justice Department officials described as the largest-ever use of denaturalization powers. The case package reaches far beyond the individuals named in it, because it tests how aggressively the federal government can challenge citizenship that was already granted, and how much fraud or misrepresentation is enough to strip it away.

Denaturalization is legal only in narrow circumstances. Under federal law and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services guidance, the government must show that citizenship was illegally procured, or obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation, and a federal judge must order the revocation in civil court. That standard has made the process rare and lengthy. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of just 11 denaturalization complaints a year, while during Trump’s first term it formally filed 102 such cases.

The latest drive reflects a sharper turn inside the administration. A June 11, 2025 Justice Department memo said the Civil Division should “prioritize and maximally pursue” denaturalization proceedings where permitted by law and supported by evidence. Last month, officials announced a dozen denaturalization cases, then the largest effort in years, before this 17-case package widened the campaign again. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said only a “very small percentage” of naturalized citizens should be worried, even as the department moves case by case through federal courts across the country.

The people now being targeted include foreign-born U.S. citizens accused of violent crimes, child sex offenses, fraud crimes and immigration fraud. Among them are a Haitian immigrant accused of sexually abusing his daughter, a man from the former Yugoslavia convicted of sexually abusing a child under 15, an immigrant from Mexico convicted of receiving sexually explicit images of minors, a former Catholic priest born in Colombia accused of child sex abuse, a Filipino-born man who pleaded guilty to a child sex crime, an Indian immigrant accused of filing fraudulent H-1B visa petitions, the daughter of a Colombian drug trafficker accused of money laundering, a Jamaica-born man convicted of wire fraud, and a Cuban-born woman accused of defrauding a tribal casino.

The broader campaign has already produced high-profile cases, including the denaturalization of Elliott Duke, a U.K.-born U.S. military veteran convicted of distributing child sexual abuse material, and the separate effort to denaturalize Manuel Rocha, the former diplomat who admitted being a Cuban spy. With roughly 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States, civil-liberties groups have warned that an aggressive reading of denaturalization authority could reverberate well beyond the 17 names now in the government’s sights.