Citizenship Stripping Precedent: Why the Scale Is the Story

The Justice Department has launched the largest citizenship-stripping campaign in modern American history, and it picked forty defendants nobody is going to rally behind. Between August 21 and October 2, the department filed denaturalization actions in federal courts against forty naturalized citizens it accuses of concealing crimes and fraud to obtain citizenship, which Attorney General Todd Blanche called the largest denaturalization effort in modern history. For scale, researchers have estimated the old pace at about eleven such cases a year from 1990 to 2017. The Citizenship Stripping Precedent being set here deserves more attention than any single case, because the filings are requests, not verdicts: the department is asking courts to cancel the naturalizations, and each case still has to be proven.

The allegations, as described by the department, are stark. The forty include people accused of acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man. According to the department, one woman concealed money-laundering activity that predated her citizenship, while another defendant failed to disclose a prior conviction for transporting child pornography. Other complaints allege false identities, hidden deportation orders, marriage fraud, and undisclosed sexual abuse. Reporting on the department's list put eleven of the forty as originally from Mexico, with the rest spread across countries including China, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sierra Leone. In Arizona, prosecutors say Gilbert Barraza, fifty-eight, entered the country illegally in 1987, applied for a passport in 1992 claiming to have been born in the United States with a forged California birth certificate, and became a citizen in 2008 while concealing the passport fraud.

The cases themselves are the easy part

Give the government its due first: stripping citizenship from people who lied to get it is the least controversial use of this power. Even people who want immigration enforcement dialed back tend to accept that fraud-based denaturalization is legitimate. Nobody's idea of fairness includes keeping citizenship obtained through forgery and concealed crimes, and the forty people named here were accused of serious offenses, not paperwork errors. If the debate stops at whether these particular defendants deserve to stay citizens, the government wins it outright. The citizenship stripping precedent, in these specific cases, is easy to defend.

That is why the defendants are not the story. What deserves scrutiny is the machinery being built around them. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said the administration will keep pursuing what he called the largest denaturalization effort in department history, and the Department of Homeland Security shared its list of the forty with the Justice Department to get the push moving. A tool that averaged about eleven uses a year for nearly three decades just got used forty times in six weeks, with a public promise of more, which looks less like a cleanup operation than an assembly line being switched on.

History suggests powerful tools rarely stay small

Denaturalization has a long American history, and it does not point in only one direction. The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations spent decades stripping citizenship from Nazi persecutors who had hidden their wartime pasts, work almost everyone considers justified. The same power was also turned in the 1920s against dozens of naturalized citizens of Indian origin after the Supreme Court ruled them racially ineligible for citizenship, against members of the German-American Bund during the Second World War, and against anarchists like Emma Goldman. Across a century, the pattern holds: the campaigns start with defendants nobody defends and creep outward from there.

The history does not settle the current push. These cases run through federal courts, where judges decide whether the government proved material fraud, and a press-release superlative is not evidence. The test will be slow and unglamorous: outcomes in court one case at a time, and whether the next rounds of targets stay limited to fraud paired with serious crime. If they do, the citizenship stripping precedent holds up. If the categories widen quietly, this week's announcement reads less like housecleaning and more like the start of something bigger. The forty defendants are not the worrying part of this story; the promise of more is.