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The Trump administration is reportedly pushing the justice department to pursue hundreds of denaturalization cases, in which Americans born outside of the US are stripped of their citizenship.
The justice department has already identified 384 foreign-born US citizens, whose citizenship it wants to revoke and will begin the process in the coming weeks, according to the New York Times.
The US government can ask a court to remove citizenship status of people who illegally obtained it. In some cases, people who have been denaturalized have been caught lying to officials or caught entering into a false marriage. In other cases, people who commit crimes can be denaturalized.
Last year, the justice department filed a memo, directing the civil division to target the denaturalization of US citizens around the country and added a number of categories of people who should be targeted. Experts say that it opened the door for the Trump administration to continue pursuing its mass deportation agenda.
Due to the high cost and manpower it takes to pursue denaturalization, the US government infrequently pursues denaturalization cases.
During a meeting last week, senior justice department officials told colleagues that civil litigators in 39 regional offices would be assigned to file the cases. It is not clear what led the justice department to target the 384 individuals.
Between 2017 and late 2025, the US stripped just over 120 naturalized citizens of their citizenship, according to the Times. Now, the 384 people they have identified is only the beginning of the administration’s push to denaturalize people. A top justice department official, Francey Hakes, said the 384 people represent “the first wave of cases” that they intend to pursue, adding that the push to denaturalize more people is a “White House initiative”.
A White House spokesperson told the Times it “isn’t a White House initiative – it’s federal law”.
In the US, when a person is denaturalized, they return to the status they held before becoming a citizen. Immigration is a civil matter, meaning that immigrants do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.
Other officials from the justice department’s civil division may be delegated to pursue this work, due to the sheer amount of manpower it may take to prosecute so many denaturalization cases. The Times warns that the initiative may divert resources from other department offices, including those pursuing healthcare or other types of fraud cases.
According to reporting from the Guardian last year, the US government must prove that a person is not of “good moral character” before a judge to justify denaturalization. Last year’s memo listed a broad range of categories of people who should be stripped of their status, including those accused of having a “nexus to terrorism” or individuals accused of being gang and cartel members.
Experts warned last year that the administration’s memo could be overly broad, considering the Trump administration’s track record of falsely accusing immigrants of being gang members and targeting political activists, based on flimsy evidence.
In recent months, the Trump administration has filed denaturalization cases against some immigrants, including a marine accused of a sex crime, an Argentinian man accused of falsely claiming to be of another nationality and a Nigerian man convicted of tax fraud, according to the Times.
There is a long history of denaturalization in the US. Throughout the 20th century, journalists, activists and labor leaders were often targeted, accused of being anarchists and communists.
Politically driven denaturalization fell off in the late 1960s, after the supreme court ruled denaturalization could only take place if someone was found to have committed fraud or “willful misrepresentation”. The categories were then narrowed, with denaturalization then focusing mostly on former war criminals, including Nazis, who lied in their records to gain US citizenship.
Denaturalization efforts grew under the Obama administration. Later, the first Trump administration supercharged those efforts, attempting to examine 700,000 files.
