The Trump administration is moving to strip citizenship from 17 naturalized Americans this month alone, marking an escalation in a campaign of denaturalization that has no parallel in modern American history. This latest push follows the Justice Department's action last month against 12 citizens and arrives as internal guidance suggests the administration aims to pursue between 100 and 200 denaturalization cases monthly.
The scale is stunning when measured against recent precedent. Over four years, the Biden administration initiated 64 denaturalization cases total. The first Trump administration brought proceedings against 168 people across an entire term. Between 1990 and 2017, the government filed just 305 such cases, many involving aging former Nazis. The current pace would dwarf all of that within months.
Denaturalization as a tool has remained largely dormant since a 1967 Supreme Court decision, Afroyim v. Rusk, raised the legal bar for stripping citizenship. The process proved costly and difficult for government prosecutors. Successive administrations, regardless of party, treated citizenship as something to be broadly protected.
What changed is the Trump administration's appetite. Last year, it published a memo expanding categories of people eligible for denaturalization. Those now at risk include any naturalized citizen the Justice Department "determines to be sufficiently important to pursue," anyone deemed "a threat to national security," and anyone with "pending criminal charges." Notably, conviction is not required. The breadth of these categories opens the door to what critics warn is political weaponization.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association flagged the danger directly. These expanded categories "are not grounded in statute and are ripe for political abuse given their breadth," the group stated. The organization warned that people with minor infractions or those who express views critical of the administration could lose citizenship even without criminal conviction.
Legitimate grounds for denaturalization exist under current law. Citizenship can be revoked if it was obtained through fraud, willful misrepresentation, or concealment of material facts. But the new framework reaches far beyond such narrow circumstances.
The demographic dimension adds another layer of concern. Those targeted for denaturalization are likely to be immigrants of color, a pattern consistent with broader administration policies. The administration has effectively ended refugee resettlement except for white South Africans. Greg Bovino, placed in charge of immigration enforcement, recently headlined an extreme-right "Remigration Summit" in Portugal, where the focus was mass expulsion of non-white immigrants from Western countries.
At a D-Day commemoration in France, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth characterized Europe as facing an "invasion" by immigrants with "dangerous ideologies." The rhetoric shapes the policy.
Author James Rodriguez: "This is denaturalization weaponized, turning a narrow legal remedy into a mass political tool designed to terrify immigrants of color who thought their citizenship was secure."
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