The Trump administration on Friday expanded denaturalization cases against roughly a dozen foreign-born U.S. citizens, moving the cases into federal courts across the country. The Justice Department said the cases involve people accused of serious crimes, immigration fraud or ties to terrorism.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche previewed the push earlier this week and said only a very small percentage of naturalized citizens should be worried. He said people who did not illegally obtain citizenship “don’t have anything to worry about.”
Todd Blanche's warning
Blanche said there are “a lot of individuals who are citizens who shouldn't be.” He also said, “We should disincentivize people from committing fraud when they're going to become a citizen of this great country.”
The administration’s move adds a sharper enforcement edge to a tool the government has used sparingly. Between 1990 and 2017, the United States filed just over 300 denaturalization cases, an average of 11 a year, for a population of roughly 24 million naturalized citizens.
Cases in federal courts
The Justice Department said the targeted citizens were born in Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan. Among them is a Colombian-born Catholic priest convicted of sexually assaulting a minor, a man born in Morocco with alleged ties to al Qaeda, a Somali immigrant who pleaded guilty to providing material support to al Shabaab, and a former Gambian police officer allegedly involved in war crimes.
Officials also said some of the targeted individuals allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits, while others allegedly entered sham marriages to commit immigration fraud. The filing pattern spans multiple states and covers a mix of alleged criminal conduct and immigration violations, not a single category of case.
Manuel Rocha case
The Justice Department said on Friday that it was also seeking to denaturalize Manuel Rocha, a former American diplomat who admitted to being a Cuban spy in a high-profile criminal case. Under U.S. law, citizenship can be revoked when the government proves it was obtained illegally or through fraud, and people who lose citizenship return to their previous legal status, typically as permanent residents.
That legal shift leaves the person in a position that can make deportation possible on certain criminal and other grounds. For the administration, the next step is the court process in the filed cases, where the government must prove the citizenship was obtained illegally or through fraud.
