President Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to file hundreds of cases this year to strip foreign-born Americans of their citizenship in a bid to surpass the number of cases filed in the past two decades combined.
Trump, 79, has vowed to make denaturalization a priority, with the Department of Justice compiling a list of 385 foreign-born Americans it wants to target for denaturalization and pressuring attorneys to accept transfers from other departments to work on the cases.
Over a two-month period this year, the Department of Justice filed 29 cases accusing naturalized U.S. citizens of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship, CNN reported.
The administration plans to file at least 250 denaturalization cases by October, compared to 166 cases filed between 2008 and June of this year.
Cases are also being referred to U.S. attorney offices nationwide, which could result in “several hundred more” cases, a senior DOJ official told CNN.
Federal law gives the government the authority to revoke citizenship of individuals who make false statements relevant to the naturalization process, or if the personal illegally received citizenship for which they weren’t eligible.
The cases are either civil or criminal depending on the circumstances, and previous administrations have tended to focus on defendants accused of war crimes and terrorism.
So far, the Trump administration has targeted people accused of committing fraud, sexual abuse of a minor, and terrorism-related activities—similar to the types of cases pursued by prior administrations.
The cases are intensive and time-consuming, and DOJ lawyers have traditionally focused on more clear-cut cases involving people found guilty of major crimes.
But now, DOJ lawyers are feeling pressure to pursue any case that can be argued under the law, including alleged fraud based on how paperwork was filled out, according to CNN.
A senior DOJ official insisted to CNN that the department is focused on people who lied about criminal history or criminal acts when they applied for U.S. citizenship.
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
Despite the Trump administration’s vows to be “laser focused” on rooting out fraud in the naturalization process, the administration has bumped up against the realities of the legal system—and the protections it affords U.S. citizens.
“They may be able to expedite the process for initiating these cases, but regardless of the steps they take before cases are filed, the litigation process itself is still going to be a huge impediment to their goal of denaturalizing people in huge numbers,” Stacey Young, an 18-year DOJ veteran who now runs Justice Connection, told CNN.
Naturalized U.S. citizens have much stronger legal protections than immigrants and migrants, who are only entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge employed by the executive branch.
Cases to revoke citizenship must be heard by federal judges and have a high burden of proof, meaning they require more government resources and provide a higher level of due process for the defendants.
The cases filed to date are far narrower than the administration’s aggressive rhetoric suggests, highlighting the legal and practical challenges of stripping Americans of their citizenship, an analysis by National Public Radio found earlier this month.
