Immigrants who gained American citizenship will only lose it if they hide their Nazi past, have ties to terrorists, or lie on their application. This happens to fewer than a dozen people per year, on average.
But that changed during President Donald Trump’s first term, when he led a campaign to denaturalize thousands of U.S. citizens — although he never managed to achieve his goals.
However, last week, Trump restarted the effort, ordering that “appropriate resources” be spent to denaturalize some U.S. citizens as part of his broader plan to restrict immigration.
Hidden among the priorities listed in his Day 1 executive orders was a one-line reference to enforcing a section of immigration law under which the government can revoke an immigrant’s American citizenship if it was “obtained illegally.”
Trump’s initial push to investigate naturalized citizens was an expansion of an initiative that began under President Barack Obama.
At the time, the federal government had swapped paper for the use of fingerprints, and Homeland Security officials discovered hundreds of cases where naturalized citizens had previously been deported or lied about criminal records that USCIS could not see. The Obama administration initiated a review, aiming to denaturalize any citizen with ties to foreign terrorist organizations.
Obama’s denaturalization review focused on individuals with potential connections to terrorist groups, or criminal histories, or who posed national security risks.
“They ignored common discrepancies in the person’s immigration history,” said Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who has researched denaturalization campaigns. “The Trump administration changed that. They put more resources into the program. The directive was to seek the denaturalization of anyone who had potential grounds for it.”
This included “discrepancies in the file — even typographical errors or an innocent mistake in the immigration process,” she said.
Research suggests that the Trump administration never reached its goal of referring 1,600 cases for civil or criminal processing, two avenues used to revoke citizenship.
Irina Manta, a law professor at Hofstra University, began building a database of denaturalization cases. She found 168 cases in the courts during the Trump administration and 64 under the Biden administration, suggesting that the effort may have decreased but has not ended in the last four years.
Source: USA Today