Conferring citizenship on an immigrant is a transaction. The person who gains U.S. citizenship becomes a full member of American society, a citizen of the greatest nation on the planet. The United States gains a productive, honest, loyal citizen.
Or, at least, that's how it should work. There are, in citizenship transactions, like any other, those who seek to gain citizenship by fraud. Now the Trump administration is devoting resources to finding these people, revoking their citizenship, and applying a metaphorical 11EE boot to their backsides to loft them back to their country of origin.
The Trump administration reportedly plans to increase efforts to denaturalize foreign-born Americans who committed fraud while applying for citizenship.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has directed its field offices to supply the Justice Department's Office of Immigration Litigation with 100 to 200 potential denaturalization cases per month in fiscal year 2026, according to internal guidance obtained by The New York Times
... which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
If fully implemented, that would mark a dramatic escalation compared with recent years. The Justice Department has filed just over 120 such cases combined from 2017 through this year, the Times reported.
USCIS has been sending experts to field offices nationwide and reassigning staff to identify cases in which citizenship may have been obtained through fraud or misrepresentation, NBC News reported.
The goal, sources told NBC, is to significantly increase referrals to DOJ attorneys, who must ultimately prove their case in federal court.
Under federal law, denaturalization is permitted only in narrow circumstances, primarily when an individual concealed material facts or committed fraud in the naturalization process.
Here's the catch: There were about 800,000 new citizens sworn in last year. There are about 26 million naturalized citizens in the United States.
That's as may be, but it doesn't make this undertaking any less important. Sure, it's a daunting task. But the law is the law. It seems likely that most of the people being investigated will either be from a country of concern (Somalia) or have some ties to a known terrorist group - like the ongoing DHS/ICE deportation efforts, this program should concentrate on known bad actors first.