The Justice Department’s pledge to prioritize stripping citizenship from naturalized U.S. citizens in more cases is fueling apprehension, with some immigration experts and attorneys calling the directive from a department leader ominous and a threat to due process.
Federal authorities have sparingly sought to rescind naturalized citizenships in recent decades, a process known as “denaturalization,” with a handful of cases each year.
In a memo last month, Brett A. Shumate, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said it would now “prioritize and maximally pursue” court cases aimed at taking citizenship away from people accused of wrongdoing.
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Shumate wrote that the agency would focus on several categories, including those involving people accused of being threats to national security, committing violent crimes or failing to disclose felonies during their naturalization. Previous administrations have also sought to denaturalize citizens in similar cases.
But immigration experts and attorneys expressed concerns that Shumate’s announcement – which involved a wider pool of people who could be targeted, including those allegedly affiliated with drug cartels or gangs – may signal a broader use of denaturalization as a tool.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration has taken an aggressive approach to immigration and sought to ramp up deportations, cut down on border crossings and eliminate birthright citizenship.
“This fits into very hostile attitudes towards people who are foreign-born in the U.S.,” said Jean Reisz, who teaches law at the University of Southern California and co-directs the school’s Immigration Clinic.
Denaturalization cases historically have most often been deployed against people accused of hiding their past ties to war crimes, terrorist groups and human rights violations while applying for citizenship, according to experts and data on cases brought by the government. Many of the most prominent cases, for instance, involved people who hid their connections to the Nazis when applying for U.S. citizenship.
“It is really about proving there was some misrepresentation, a material misrepresentation or fraud in the process itself,” said David Thronson, a law professor at Michigan State University who has worked on and studied immigration matters. “It’s an error-correcting procedure.”
Finding errors in the process is not easy, Thronson said, because officials are “fairly rigorous in vetting people in the front end,” which involves background checks and interviews. “You don’t just walk in and get naturalization,” he said.
Naturalized citizens account for a significant portion of the American population. According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2022 there were more than 24 million naturalized citizens living in the United States.
From 1990 to 2017, the government filed an average of 11 denaturalization cases a year, according to research by the Immigration Legal Resource Center, though year-by-year numbers began to tick upward after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and again under an initiative launched by President Barack Obama.
Trump’s first administration, which began in 2017, sought to expand those efforts even further. His first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, described denaturalization as a “strategic objective” for the Justice Department. In 2020, the department launched a section focused on denaturalization, with a specialized group of attorneys focused on pursuing criminal and civil denaturalization cases in court.
Despite the resources focused on that effort, the administration did not produce a deluge of cases, said Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas-based attorney who represents people in denaturalization cases.
“They didn’t file thousands of cases, likely because these cases are so resource-heavy, and their attorneys were so tied up in court defending Trump’s various other immigration policies, many of which were found to be unlawful,” he said in an email.
Irina Manta, a Hofstra University law professor, began compiling a database tracking denaturalization cases and found 168 in federal courts during Trump’s first term in office. During President Joe Biden’s term, the Justice Department filed another 64 cases, her research found.
The department’s Biden-era priorities emphasized denaturalizing alleged human rights violators, national security threats and people with felony convictions who posed an ongoing public safety risk.
Shumate’s guidelines – issued in a memo dated June 11, the day he was sworn in as an assistant attorney general – incorporated those priorities and expanded the pool of potential targets for denaturalization.
The larger group of categories included people who further “the unlawful enterprise of criminal gangs, transnational organizations and drug cartels,” those “engaged in fraud” against corporations or individual victims and any other cases referred to Shumate’s division that it deems “sufficiently important to pursue.”
Shumate’s memo “is incredibly broad and open-ended,” said Lori Nessel, a law professor at Seton Hall University and director of its Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic. Nessel said she was particularly concerned about the unspecified cases that might be deemed important enough to pursue.
“That is so broad, and that really leaves it open for this incredible politicization, just using this as a weapon,” she said.
Trump allies have in recent weeks publicly suggested rescinding naturalized citizenships of the administration’s political opponents. Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tennessee) recently wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking for an investigation into whether Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York mayor, should face denaturalization proceedings. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, was naturalized in 2018.
Attorneys and experts said the broader list of categories in Shumate’s memo could open up more people to facing possible denaturalization if the administration disapproved of their actions.
Many of the potential targets for denaturalization described in the memo have been long-standing priorities for Justice Department lawyers under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.
But the Trump administration has “taken the view that there are people who are a threat to national security who historically presidential administrations would not have considered threats.”
Trump administration officials have labeled student demonstrators protesting Israel and advocating for Palestinians as threats to national security, most notably in its efforts to revoke the green card of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil.
Hoppock noted that the Trump administration has already used allegations of gang activity to summarily deport hundreds of undocumented migrants based on evidence that courts later called into question.
“We have seen this administration use that designation to do bad things already,” he said.
Christopher Wellborn, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said in a statement that Shumate’s memo “sends the message that those not born in the United States risk losing their citizenship for previous or future conduct, creating an unacceptable threat that a criminal charge could rip them from their communities.”
Attorneys raised other concerns, particularly about the issues being raised in civil cases, rather than criminal ones, where defendants are guaranteed a lawyer.
“Because they’re civil, there’s no right to a lawyer if the person can’t afford to hire a lawyer on their own,” Nessel said. “I can picture situations where the government is putting incredible resources into this,” she said, and facing off with someone who cannot hire an attorney.
The Justice Department said in a statement that it was “committed to maintaining the integrity of the naturalization program.”
“As stated in the memo, denaturalization proceedings will only be pursued as permitted by law and supported by evidence against individuals who illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process,” a spokesperson said in the statement. “Those who gain citizenship through unlawful means and endanger our national security will not maintain the benefits of being an American citizen.”
Immigration experts and attorneys said they doubted Shumate’s memo would lead to a sudden flood of denaturalizations. These cases require resources and attorneys to work on them, they said, and the Justice Department would have to persuade federal judges to sign off on them.
“I think the district courts are going to be very skeptical when it comes to denaturalizing individuals,” said Reisz, the law professor, particularly when cases involve something “less egregious than lying about your identity or lying about a criminal offense. If it’s going to be extending to tax fraud or something that isn’t clear cut.”
Denaturalization cases are brought by the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, and they typically account for a small fraction of the office’s work. Like many other parts of the Justice Department, the office has seen a significant number of departures during Trump’s second term, and it is not clear how it would address any large uptick in denaturalization cases.
The Justice Department did not respond to a question about whether it planned to dedicate more attorneys to denaturalization cases or how many.
Last month, the Justice Department said that it had successfully petitioned a judge to revoke the citizenship of someone naturalized in 2013 and later accused of possessing and sharing child pornography.
Some legal experts said that even if Shumate’s memo does not lead to a flood of people losing their citizenship, the impact could be felt across the country in other ways.
“Even if they’re not going to successfully denaturalize a lot of people, many immigrants or naturalized citizens might not want to stay in a country that is openly hostile to people who are not born in the United States,” Reisz said.