The Justice Department has identified 384 foreign-born U.S. citizens whose citizenship it plans to revoke, signaling an aggressive new phase in the Trump administration's immigration enforcement strategy. The department expects to begin filing cases in the coming weeks, with civil litigators across 39 regional offices assigned to handle the workload.
Denaturalization allows the government to strip citizenship from people who obtained it through fraud, false statements, or criminal conduct. The process is rare due to its expense and resource demands. Between 2017 and late 2025, the U.S. revoked citizenship for just over 120 naturalized citizens. The current push represents a dramatic acceleration.
Francey Hakes, a top Justice Department official, described the 384 cases as "the first wave" of a broader effort, characterizing the initiative as a "White House initiative." A White House spokesperson pushed back, stating it is simply "federal law" being enforced.
Last year, the Justice Department issued a memo directing its civil division to pursue denaturalization cases and identified broad categories of targets, including people with alleged links to terrorism, gang membership, or cartel involvement. The memo opened the door for the current administration to extend its mass deportation agenda beyond removal proceedings into citizenship revocation.
The specific reasons for targeting these 384 individuals remain unclear. Recent cases filed by the department include a Marine accused of sexual assault, an Argentinian immigrant accused of falsely claiming another nationality, and a Nigerian national convicted of tax fraud.
Immigration proceedings are civil matters, meaning defendants have no right to legal representation at government expense. If denaturalized, individuals revert to their pre-citizenship status, potentially facing deportation. Legal experts have warned that the Justice Department's broad categorical approach could sweep in cases with weak evidence, particularly given the administration's history of falsely labeling immigrants as gang members and misusing terrorism designations against political opponents.
The resource demands of this campaign may divert Justice Department staff from other priorities. The Times reported the initiative could pull civil litigators away from cases involving healthcare fraud and other white-collar crimes.
Denaturalization has a troubled history in the U.S. Throughout the 20th century, the government weaponized it against journalists, labor leaders, and activists accused of communist or anarchist sympathies. Those practices subsided after the Supreme Court ruled in the late 1960s that denaturalization required proof of fraud or willful misrepresentation. The focus narrowed to former Nazi war criminals and others who lied on naturalization records.
The Obama administration revived denaturalization enforcement. The first Trump administration then escalated it dramatically, attempting to examine 700,000 files. The current administration is now mobilizing the government machinery to systematically process hundreds of cases simultaneously.
Author James Rodriguez: "This isn't just immigration policy, it's a wholesale reopening of citizenship itself as a battleground, and the Justice Department's vague targeting criteria suggest a lot of people could end up caught in the net."
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