Trump administration working to expand effort to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans

(NBC News)- WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is dramatically expanding an effort to revoke U.S. citizenship for foreign-born Americans as it works to curb immigration, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Over the past several months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that’s responsible for legal immigration, has been sending experts to its offices around the country or reassigning staff members to focus on whether some citizens processed through those offices could now be denaturalized, these people said.

The goal of emphasizing naturalized citizens is to supply the office of immigration litigation with 100 to 200 possible cases per month, one of the people familiar with the plans said. Such cases have typically been very rare, involving people who concealed criminal histories or previous human rights violations during their application processes. The New York Times first reported the quota.

By comparison, throughout the four years of President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration formally filed a total of 102 such cases, according to the Justice Department.

The effort is part of the overall push by Homeland Security to drastically curtail immigration and deliver on Trump’s policy agenda. The push has included DHS’ sending scores of immigration enforcement officers into U.S. cities on deportation missions and purchasing mega warehouses to hold detainees.

DHS has also increasingly sought to remove legal immigrants from the U.S. by revoking thousands of visas, including for some people who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, and trying to deport green card holders.

A spokesman for USCIS, Matthew Tragesser, said the agency reviews cases of naturalized citizens when there is credible evidence that citizenship was obtained through fraud or misrepresentation.

“We maintain a zero-tolerance policy towards fraud in the naturalization process and will pursue denaturalization proceedings for any individual who lied or misrepresented themselves,” he said. “We will continue to relentlessly pursue those undermining the integrity of America’s immigration system and work alongside the Department of Justice to ensure that only those who meet citizenship standards retain the privilege of U.S. citizenship.”

Trump administration officials are looking for shortcuts to speed up the process, the two people familiar with the plans said. USCIS officials have concluded that dedicating staff members, either by sending experts or by training them across the agency’s 80-plus field offices nationwide, would be more effective in rooting out more cases than the previous Trump effort, headquartered in a warehouse in Pasadena, California, they said.

The Justice Department has already told attorneys to focus on denaturalization cases, and it has offered possible case examples, from “individuals who pose a risk to national security” or who have engaged in war crimes or torture to people who have committed Medicaid or Medicare fraud or have otherwise defrauded the government.

There is also a broad catch-all provision that refers to “any other cases … that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”

Often the cases go on beyond a presidential administration. According to Justice Department figures, the Trump administration won 86 cases during Trump’s first term. During the Biden administration, 54 cases were won.

Trump has long been preoccupied with the notion of citizenship — who gets to be an American and who doesn’t — and has expressed displeasure with immigrants from what he calls third world nations. He is separately seeking the power to strip citizenship from those born to foreigners in the U.S., though “birthright citizenship” appears in the Constitution. The Supreme Court is weighing his argument.

Trump’s Truth Social message to Americans on Thanksgiving Day last year was that he would remove anyone who wasn’t a “net asset” to the U.S. “or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Roughly 800,000 people become naturalized citizens every year, according to DHS. To become a naturalized citizen, a candidate must be over 18, already be a legal permanent resident, speak English, know U.S. history and social studies and have “good moral character,” according to the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

Foreign-born Americans were generally stripped of citizenship only if they were found to have committed fraud during their application processes. In past decades, those cases focused on ferreting out former Nazis who fled to the U.S. after World War II under false pretenses. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to increase investigations, but it’s still rare for a reason, a former USCIS official said.

“It’s so important for current and future naturalized U.S. citizens to know that no president can unilaterally strip people of the citizenship they’ve worked so hard to earn,” said Doug Rand, another former USCIS official.

The denaturalization process is lengthy and time-consuming, and there is a high legal bar. Even if the administration makes the push to investigate someone with the aim to denaturalize, it could take years, and a subsequent deportation would take even longer.

“Denaturalization is a significant tool that should be used in rare cases,” said Sarah Pierce, an immigration policy analyst who was a USCIS official under former President Joe Biden.

Pierce said USCIS has a lot of discretion when it decides to approve someone for naturalization, so it’s possible that someone who had no issues flagged upon becoming a citizen could face additional scrutiny now.

She said there were concerns that some of the Trump administration’s immigration policy changes could “make some naturalized citizens vulnerable to claims of fraud or misrepresentation retroactively.”

Republican lawmakers recently introduced a bill that would allow the government to strip citizenship from anyone found to have committed fraud against the government or joined a terrorist group or anyone who is convicted of a serious felony within 10 years of their citizenship.

So far in Trump’s second term, 16 cases have been filed and the administration has won seven, including one case involving a man originally from the United Kingdom who had been convicted of receiving and distributing sexually explicit images of children.

Deborah Chen, supervising attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group’s immigrant protection services program, said some clients who had pending naturalization applications when the new policies went into effect were denied because they owed taxes, even though they were on payment plans.

She added that it could signal that immigration officers may be seeking more proof of “good moral character,” which they prove by showing “positive attributes,” such as family caregiving, educational attainment, stable employment and community involvement.

There are growing concerns that the DHS effort is more about creating fear and less about successfully stripping citizenship. Even if Americans swept up in investigations aren’t prosecuted or convicted, the process takes a financial and emotional toll; they’d have to hire lawyers and produce documents.

Margy O’Herron, a senior fellow in the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, said the mere threat of denaturalization creates real terror.

“Citizens are afraid that if they do or say something the government doesn’t like — even if those things are lawful and protected by the Constitution — they will be a target,” she said.