Trump administration vowed to revoke hundreds of citizenships. It’s off to a slow start
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Trump administration says it wants to step up the process of taking away the citizenship of foreign-born Americans - denaturalization - as part of its broader immigration enforcement. NPR's Jaclyn Diaz joins us in our studios. Jaclyn, thanks so much for being with us.
JACLYN DIAZ, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And you've been investigating denaturalization cases. How many are we talking about here?
DIAZ: In the last year and a half, the department has filed more than 60 cases to revoke citizenship. That's more than during all four years of the Biden administration. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the administration views this as just another tool to deal with border security. Here he is speaking about this work at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix last month.
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TODD BLANCHE: We're saying you cannot stay here. You have to go. We're trying to protect the integrity of the naturalization process.
DIAZ: I took a look at 34 cases the DOJ has publicly announced. Of those, 11 cases so far resulted in the DOJ successfully stripping someone of their citizenship. Most of these cases involved people charged or serving prison time for fraud, child sexual abuse or drug trafficking. And the DOJ says in court filings that these defendants hid information about their crimes they committed before or during the citizenship process. And because of that, they should not have been granted an American passport. Now, that's something that the government has always been able to do if people lie during the citizenship process.
SIMON: And Jaclyn, how does this compare to previous administrations and how they've used denaturalization?
DIAZ: Historically, denaturalization has been a rare step, but the government has used it to go after people who committed extremely serious crimes, like human rights abuses or who lied about being members of the Nazi Party. And it can take a long time to bring these cases, and it can be expensive, and that's part of the reluctance - that's according to a couple of former DOJ attorneys.
But there are some key differences now. Since Trump took office, the department has lost thousands of skilled lawyers, so the DOJ has now assigned denaturalization cases to U.S. attorneys' offices across the country, rather than taking those cases in-house. One attorney who used to work on this told me they had discretion on what cases to bring. But before they left the government, that changed, and they were told to go after anyone, even people who committed minor paperwork errors or discrepancies.
SIMON: And what are the risks to that approach?
DIAZ: So there is definitely some concern. Cassandra Robertson is a law professor at Case Western University.
CASSANDRA ROBERTSON: I might not feel sorry for the heinous child abuser who loses their citizenship, but I am going to lose sleep over what it does to the system because once it becomes easy to take somebody's citizenship away, it becomes easy to take anybody's citizenship away.
DIAZ: A person familiar says the DOJ has identified potential cases of hundreds of foreign-born Americans to look into for possible denaturalization, but they did not disclose more details about what those cases have in common. I asked Daniel Kanstroom what he makes of all of this. He's a professor of law at Boston College who specializes in immigration.
DANIEL KANSTROOM: I'm not seeing, like, a major surge of worrisome denaturalizations. And in a way, when I look at these cases and other cases, I'm kind of reassured.
DIAZ: And that's because people facing denaturalization still have strong legal protections. These cases are filed in federal court, not in immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, and defendants can still challenge the evidence and appeal decisions to strip their citizenship.
SIMON: NPR's Jaclyn Diaz. Thanks so much.
DIAZ: Thank you.
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