The Department of Justice has identified almost 400 foreign-born individuals it intends to strip of U.S. citizenship and deport, according to a new report. This development is part of President Donald Trump's expansive immigration crackdown, which seeks to intensify denaturalization efforts.
Senior DOJ officials disclosed at an agency meeting in Washington, D.C., last week that civil prosecutors in nearly 40 U.S. attorney's offices would be assigned to file denaturalization cases against 384 naturalized citizens, as reported by The New York Times on Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter.
“The message it sends is that naturalized citizens don’t have the same rights and stability as native-born citizens,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia specializing in denaturalization, to the publication.
Stripping citizenship is historically rare. According to a 2019 essay by Frost, the government pursued an average of just 11 denaturalization cases per year between 1990 and 2017. However, since Trump's first term, the number has risen, with over 120 cases filed between 2017 and late 2025, as per a previous NYT report. For context, more than 7.9 million people were naturalized over the last decade, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The Trump administration frames this initiative as “rooting out” criminals who defrauded the naturalization process. DOJ spokesman Matthew Tragesser stated that the agency is “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history” and is “laser focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process.”
Naturalization is a rigorous and costly process. Applicants must provide biometric data, a detailed personal history including any criminal records, and pass civics and English tests. Foreign-born Americans can be denaturalized through federal courts if convicted of a crime or found to have committed fraud during naturalization.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson called citizenship fraud a “serious crime,” telling The New York Times, “Anyone who has broken the law and obtained citizenship through fraud and deceit will be held accountable.”
The Independent has contacted the White House and DOJ for comment. An internal DOJ memo from last summer, later made public, advised the Civil Division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.” Furthermore, the Trump administration has pushed DHS to identify 100 to 200 potential denaturalization cases per month for referral to the DOJ, according to an NBC News report last February.
