The Trump Administration Promises the ‘Largest Denaturalization Effort Ever’

The Trump administration pledged to define itself largely by a hard-line approach to immigration. In keeping with that promise, it is pursuing what the government calls the “largest denaturalization effort ever.”

Denaturalization isn’t new, but it has been used sparingly in modern history, in part because it is extremely costly and time-consuming amid finite resources. An immigrant may be denaturalized for a few reasons, including misrepresenting themselves to the government in a way that helped them obtain citizenship and committing certain crimes prior to naturalization occurring.

This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had pinpointed 25 naturalized immigrants whose citizenship it would seek to revoke. “Today’s filings represent the largest coordinated denaturalization effort in Department history, but they are only the beginning,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “The Justice Department will continue to use every tool available to protect the integrity of the naturalization process and the safety of the American people.”

The move comes shortly after the administration’s July announcement that it would seek “to revoke U.S. citizenship from 10 naturalized criminals including child molesters, scammers, and drug dealers.” The cases appear to be largely in line with the ones previous administrations pursued.

The departure is mostly that it is now a priority as opposed to an outlier. From 1990 to 2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases. Trump’s second administration, meanwhile, has filed 123 cases in a little over a year and a half, the government said Monday. In April of this year, it was revealed that the Justice Department had 384 people in its sights for denaturalization; the administration has set a quota for denaturalization referrals from the Department of Homeland Security. 

It is generally difficult to strip someone of citizenship after it has been conferred. The government must meet a high burden of proof, and the subjects of such cases are entitled to a much more robust process than non-naturalized potential deportees. The diversion of limited resources, The New York Times notes, may affect how the DOJ is able to approach priorities like “health-care fraud, procurement fraud, enforcement of civil rights laws, and asset forfeiture cases.” (I will admit that the government focusing less on seizing assets from people who are potentially innocent, in favor of deporting offenders found guilty of crimes, does not necessarily seem scandalous to me. But I digress.)

As with the administration’s earlier push to expel various students from the U.S., making denaturalization a priority will not do much to inflate the White House’s raw deportation numbers. Though President Donald Trump came to office promising the largest mass deportation campaign in history, his administration has generally deported people at similar rates as previous presidents, to the dismay of some conservatives. But the rejiggering of priorities is a reminder that the bigger change here is one of public relations.