Justice Department’s effort to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans could face widespread judicial pushback

The Justice Department has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it wants to revoke as “the first wave” of such measures, according to recent reporting by The New York Times. These cases are being assigned to prosecutors in 39 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. The administration has ordered Department of Homeland Security staffers to refer upward of 200 denaturalization cases per month to the Justice Department as part of its crackdown on immigration, compared to an average of 11 cases per year between 1990 and 2017. This shift comes as the Justice Department faces a severe staffing crisis, having lost nearly 1,000 assistant U.S. attorneys in resignations and firings. The strategy of distributing cases to regional offices appears designed both to increase capacity and to work around the expertise gap created by staff departures. As we document in recent research, denaturalization risks becoming a tool of political control and intimidation. The lack of any statute of limitations in civil denaturalization gives prosecutors what the Supreme Court in 2017, in Maslenjak v. United States, warned against: “nearly limitless leverage” over naturalized citizens – creating permanent vulnerability for over 20 million naturalized Americans. A brief history Denaturalization is different from deportation,…

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