US Justice Department hardens efforts to denaturalise citizens

An aggressive new directive has millions of Americans who became legal citizens through the naturalisation process living in fear of having their citizenship revoked. By Cassandra Burke Robertson and Irina D Manta

- By Cassandra Burke Robertson and Irina D Manta

The Trump administration wants to take away citizenship from naturalised Americans on a massive scale.

Although a recent US Justice Department memo prioritises national security cases, it directs employees to “maximally pursue denaturalisation proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence” across 10 broad priority categories.

Denaturalisation is different from deportation, which removes non-citizens from the country. With civil denaturalisation, the government files a lawsuit to strip people’s US citizenship after they have become citizens, turning them back into non-citizens who can then be deported.

The government can only do this in specific situations. It must prove someone “illegally procured” citizenship by not meeting the requirements, or that they lied or hid important facts during the citizenship process.

The Trump administration's “maximal enforcement” approach means pursuing any case where evidence might support taking away citizenship, regardless of priority level or strength of evidence. This has already led to cases like that of Baljinder Singh, whose citizenship was revoked based on a name discrepancy that could easily have resulted from a translator's error rather than intentional fraud.

A brief history

For most of American history, taking away citizenship has been rare. But it increased dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s during the Red Scare period characterised by intense suspicion of communism. The US government targeted people it thought were communists or Nazi supporters. Between 1907 and 1967, more than 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship this way.

Everything changed in 1967 when the Supreme Court decided Afroyim v Rusk. The court said the government usually cannot take away citizenship without the person’s consent. It left open only cases involving fraud during the citizenship process.