The Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed Thursday it has moved ahead with multiple referrals to strip citizenship from those who have naturalized, assigning cases to U.S. attorney offices across the country.
It’s an unusual push for several reasons. Denaturalization of foreign-born citizens is rare and usually only done in cases when someone committed fraud in pursuit of immigrating to the U.S. or if they committed certain disqualifying crimes.
The process is also usually carried out by attorneys specializing in immigration, rather than by line prosecutors.
“The Department of Justice is laser-focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process. Under the leadership of President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department is pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history, thanks to close partnerships” with immigration agencies, Matthew Tragesser, the DOJ’s deputy director for communications, said in a statement.
“We are moving at warp speed to ensure fraudsters are held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent. Our filed referrals in one year have exceeded the total during the entire four years of the Biden administration, with many more to come.”
The confirmation follows reporting from The New York Times that some 384 cases were referred for denaturalization litigation.
Research shows that would be a massive uptick in such cases. Between 1990 and 2018, the government brought just 305 denaturalization cases.
Immigrants follow a lengthy process to obtain citizenship, one that ends with a requirement to pass a test.
In December, the Trump administration directed the Department of Homeland Security to make as many as 200 referrals for potential denaturalization.
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