They're Coming for Naturalized Citizens

It came on the last page of a Justice Department memo, but the implications were enormous. No more would the United States use threats of denaturalization — revoking American citizenship — only in extraordinary circumstances. From now on, the DOJ would “maximally pursue” denaturalization, stripping immigrants of citizenship in “all viable” cases. The DOJ is sending a clear message: under the Trump administration, removing people’s citizenship will no longer be a rarity. It will be a priority.

For many decades, the DOJ pursued an average of 11 denaturalization cases per year, against people like Elliott Duke, who was convicted of several child sex abuse material charges. Duke, born in the UK and a US citizen since 2013, failed to disclose past crimes on his naturalization forms, and this lack of disclosure made his citizenship invalid from the start. A court agreed, and Elliott Duke is no longer a citizen of the United States.

The new DOJ memo says the government is going after violent criminals and fraudsters, but it makes clear that this is just the starting point. It further says that the DOJ “retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate.”

The number of denaturalization cases has risen sharply under Trump. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed just 305 cases total. But according to DOJ spokesperson Chad Gilmartin, Trump’s first term saw a total of 102 denaturalization cases. The rate fell off again under Biden, to just 24 over four years. But the numbers are ticking back up — In the first five months of Trump’s second term, the DOJ has already filed five, and to judge by the DOJ memo, a lot more will be on the way.

This memo raises other questions for which there seem to be few answers: will the DOJ use threats of denaturalization to silence speech it doesn’t want? And if so, does that mean naturalized citizens enjoy a lower tier of First Amendment rights? Is it only the past the DOJ can hold against you? Or does conduct that occurred after naturalization also count?

For the 24.5 million naturalized citizens in the US, it would be hard not to wonder whether citizenship is truly safe.

How denaturalization works

There are two main paths to taking someone’s citizenship away.

The first is through criminal charges of immigration fraud that lead to a conviction. This usually results in the automatic revocation of citizenship. Immigration fraud would include things like identity theft or human trafficking.

The second path is civil denaturalization, which covers two main categories. One is “illegal procurement,” meaning that someone did not meet the requirements for citizenship to begin with (even if they did not realize this at the time). Those requirements include, for example, being “a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.”

The second main category of civil denaturalization is for concealment or misrepresentation of facts that would have influenced the naturalization decision. In 2015, for instance, the government revoked the citizenship of an immigrant from South Korea because it learned he had smuggled women into the US and made them work against their will. This showed that he did not, in fact, have the required character to become a citizen. (The US pursued separate, non-immigration criminal charges against him but used civil proceedings to revoke his citizenship.)

The DOJ’s new push is routed through its Civil Division, which allows the government to take advantage of the fact that the burden of proof is lower in civil cases and defendants don’t have the same legal protections as in a criminal trial. In criminal trials, the Constitution guarantees the right to an attorney, the right to remain silent, and the right to a jury that must unanimously find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. None of that is provided for in civil proceedings. If a person facing denaturalization can’t afford a lawyer, they’re on their own. If they choose not to speak in self-defense, their silence could be taken as incriminating. Their case will not be decided by a jury of their peers. And the government doesn’t have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The vagueness of naturalization laws potentially leaves naturalized citizens subject to abuse or retaliation from the government. In order to become a citizen, they must be a person of “good moral character,” which is not defined under the law and is open to interpretation by immigration officials. What is the standard for being “well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States”? There is no statutory definition. It leaves the door open for government officials to target someone simply by arguing that they engaged in behavior it defines as “immoral” or “not disposed to the happiness of the United States,” and thus that they did not meet the requirements for citizenship and are subject to denaturalization.

Simple errors in applying for citizenship could be reinterpreted as attempts to deceive. It’s possible the government could go through “regular folks’ immigration files to find a T that is not crossed or an I that is not dotted so they can use it as a weapon,” said Matthew Hoppock, an attorney who has represented clients in denaturalization cases.

ICE even has a section on their website about denaturalization that says, “Say a person committed a crime in 2020 and wasn’t caught. They became a naturalized citizen in 2021, and they were tried for and convicted of the 2020 crime in 2025. This person lied when answering the question ‘Have you ever committed a crime or offense for which you were not arrested?’ They had committed a crime, and they were only convicted after they were awarded American citizenship.”

Some experts think that the administration might even try to denaturalize citizens for conduct after they became citizens. “Although the memo purports to target concealment of earlier offenses,” said Christopher Wellborn, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “the language suggests that any offense, at any time, may be used to justify denaturalization… In effect, this directive sends the message that those not born in the United States risk losing their citizenship for previous or future conduct.”

Wellborn found the memo “particularly concerning given the administration’s reliance on vague claims of gang affiliation in deportations.” The Trump administration has deported unauthorized immigrants to a prison in El Salvador after claiming that common tattoos — which experts deny are specifically associated with gangs — proved they were gang members. “It is not difficult,” Wellborn said, “to imagine a scenario where the government invokes unsubstantiated claims of gang affiliation or uses an individual’s criminal record to claim that citizenship was illegally procured.”

Even the powerful aren’t immune

Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee is among those pushing the Trump administration to go even further in its denaturalization efforts. In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Ogles called for the deportation of Zohran Mamdani — a New York state assemblyman and the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City — and questioned whether Mamdani should have ever been granted US citizenship in the first place.

Andy Ogles

Ogles pointed to lyrics from a rap song Mamdani wrote and performed in 2017, a year before he became a naturalized US citizen. In the track, titled “Salaam,” Mamdani says, “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up.” Ogles claims this amounted to “publicly praising” individuals convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and raised concerns that Mamdani “held affiliations or sympathies he failed to disclose during the naturalization process.”

The “Holy Land Five” refers to five men who ran the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Muslim charity in the US. In 2009, a federal jury convicted them of illegally funneling money to Hamas, a group the US designated a terrorist organization in 1997. All five were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Ogles didn’t stop at criticizing Mamdani’s speech. He urged the DOJ to investigate whether the lyrics should have disqualified Mamdani from citizenship — and called for him to be denaturalized and deported. “The federal government must uphold public trust by ensuring that citizenship is not granted under false pretenses,” Ogles wrote.

Trump joined the chorus, saying, “Well, then we’ll have to arrest him. Look, we don’t need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.”

The president then added, “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything.”

“The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported,” Mamdani responded. He called it “a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you.”

Then there’s Elon Musk, who became a naturalized US citizen in 2002. Earlier this year, Trump publicly suggested that the world’s richest man should be deported. On the surface, that’s not the same as denaturalization, but a US citizen can’t be deported unless their citizenship is first revoked. The threat is implied.

The former political allies fell out after Musk criticized the administration’s spending and rejected Trump’s signature domestic policy plan. In response, Trump mused about the possibility that Musk would “have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa” if his companies didn’t receive government subsidies and contracts. Later, Trump was asked whether Musk should be deported. He replied, “We’ll have to take a look.”

That threat may seem far-fetched, but Musk’s immigration history has raised questions. In the 1990s, he entered the US on a student visa. The Washington Post recently reported that during this period he was working without proper authorization while launching his first startup. Some argue that if the government chose to, it could claim Musk misrepresented his immigration status — a potential basis for denaturalization under the Justice Department’s current priorities.

Musk denies these claims, and says his student visa permitted him to work. And neither Musk nor Mamdani has been formally investigated. But the threats against them show how the denaturalization process might be weaponized against people or groups if government officials choose to make targets of them. Most naturalized citizens don’t have the same benefits of wealth and fame to bolster their cases.

And if the fear of denaturalization makes them hold their tongues instead of criticizing the government or prominent politicians, then a naturalized citizen’s First Amendment rights are less protected than those of someone born here.

Besides, if today’s government can threaten to denaturalize someone over a controversial song or political stance, what’s to stop a future Democratic administration from targeting pro-MAGA immigrants for deportation? Denaturalization enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for — this kind of power rarely stays in just one party’s hands.

“Very hostile attitudes”

For those who became part of this nation after birth, US citizenship probably felt like a finish line — the final step in a long journey toward belonging. Now they may wonder whether it’s just a checkpoint.

Musk and Mamdani will probably be fine. And we can be glad that Duke, the child pornographer, is no longer a citizen. But there are tens of millions of naturalized citizens in this country. The vast majority are law-abiding members of their communities who pledged to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

But now, the denaturalization push “fits into very hostile attitudes towards people who are foreign-born in the US,” said Jean Reisz, who teaches law at the University of Southern California and co-directs the school’s Immigration Clinic. “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.”