The Department of Justice has identified almost 400 foreign-born people it wants to strip U.S. citizenship from and deport, according to a new report.
As part of President Donald Trump’s massive immigration crackdown, his administration is pushing to ramp up denaturalizations.
Senior DOJ officials said 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, The New York Times reported 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,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia with expertise on denaturalization, told the publication.
Stripping citizenship is very rare, with the government pursuing an average of 11 denaturalization cases between 1990 and 2017, according to a 2019 essay from Frost.
The government has pursued an average of more cases per year since Trump’s first term. Between 2017 and late 2025, more than 120 denaturalization cases were filed in total, according to a previous NYT report.
To put it in perspective, more than 7.9 million people were naturalized over the last decade, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The Trump administration frames the issue as “rooting out” criminals who defrauded the naturalization process.
DOJ officials are “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history,” agency spokesman Matthew Tragesser told The NYT. He said the DOJ is “laser focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process.”
Naturalization is an extensive and expensive process. Applicants for U.S. citizenship must provide biometric data, give a detailed history of themselves, including any criminal records, and pass civics and English tests.
Foreign-born Americans can be denaturalized through the federal court system if they are convicted of a crime or if they committed fraud during their naturalization process.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson called citizenship fraud a “serious crime,” telling The NYT, “Anyone who has broken the law and obtained citizenship through fraud and deceit will be held accountable.”
The Independent has reached out to the White House and DOJ for comment.
The DOJ issued an internal memo last summer advising the agency’s Civil Division on the Trump administration’s policy objectives, which include prioritizing denaturalization.
Officials in the Civil Division “shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” the memo, which was later made public, read.
The Trump administration has pushed DHS to find 100 to 200 possible denaturalization cases a month to refer to the DOJ, according to an NBC News report last February, which cited a person familiar with the matter.
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