Mass denaturalization could be used to move the country toward the MAGA movement’s larger goal of a white Christian nationalist United States.
President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he boards Air Force One before departing Miami International Airport, in Miami, Florida, on April 3, 2025.
(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2017, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice filed denaturalization cases against five men who had been convicted of child sexual abuse. Some had committed their crimes prior to filing for naturalization but others had carried them out long after they’d become citizens. While the outcomes of these cases are not public, it is likely that the Department of Justice deported these men and stripped them of their citizenship. Given Trump’s racist campaign rhetoric, this was almost a relief; these cases indicated that denaturalization proceedings would be pursued only against “the worst criminals.” The first Trump administration did accelerate denaturalization cases, but there was no mass effort to strip thousands of Americans of their citizenship.
But this time may be different. One indication came when President Donald Trump told Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he would like to deport homegrown criminals. “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump was recorded as saying, referring to CECOT—the infamous mega-prison to which the Trump administration has already deported more than 200 Venezuelan migrants.
On May 1, during a Judiciary Committee meeting, congressional Democrats proposed an amendment to the budget bill that would preclude ICE from using the many millions of additional dollars that the Republicans are allocating for immigration enforcement to be used to deport or detain any US citizen. House Republicans refused to allow the amendment, granting further credence to the premise that the denaturalization dragnet will extend not only to naturalized citizens convicted of egregious crimes but to any naturalized citizens that run afoul of the White House.
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In its second term, the Trump administration first pursued the undocumented, followed by the legal visa holders and then went after green-card holders. Naturalized citizens are the obvious next category to be added to the purge, and, unlike some of Trump’s other brash eviscerations of due process that his administration is considering, the legal architecture for stripping people of their citizenship already exists.
As I wrote in 2018, the Trump administration understands that a roided-up denaturalization effort could be used to achieve the MAGA movement’s larger goal of a white Christian nationalist United States. Denaturalization is an easy way to rid itself of US citizens who do not fit the narrow MAGA categories of the desirables. Operation Janus began under President Barack Obama in 2009 and was intended to identify fraud using biometric fingerprint records. The government used the fingerprint information to see if people who had been convicted of crimes—and hence were ineligible for citizenship—had nevertheless applied for immigration benefits. Today, with the digitization of so much more data, Operation Janus has given the Trump administration the tools it needs to find excuses—however thin—to demand that judges take away a person’s citizenship.
According to the United States Customs and Immigration Service, a revocation of naturalization can occur if a person wasn’t actually eligible for citizenship in the first place or if they lied or concealed crucial fact. You can also lose citizenship if you belonged to the Communist Party or a terrorist or totalitarian organization. In the past, denaturalization, which is a civil procedure, was attached to criminal proceedings for fraud or human rights abuses with denaturalization as an added civil penalty. In the 2017 case U.S. v. Maslenjak, for instance, a man who lied on his naturalization application had said he feared reprisals from Serbian militias when he, in fact, had been a member of one. He was criminally prosecuted for fraud and lost his citizenship.
But the Trump administration realized that, because denaturalization is a civil procedure, people do not have to be provided with counsel. The burden of proof for civil denaturalization cases is only “clear convincing and unequivocal evidence that does not leave the issue in doubt” as opposed to the criminal standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Civil cases of denaturalization allow the administration to parrot the line that everyone who breaks immigration laws is a “criminal” while avoiding the safeguards of an actual criminal court. Finally, there is no statute of limitations on civil denaturalization cases, which means that the administration can target US citizens who were naturalized decades earlier.
In 2020, toward the end of the first Trump administration, Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt announced the creation of the Denaturalization Section within the Office of Immigration Litigation—since rebranded as the Enforcement Section—whose express purpose is to handle civil litigation that would deny naturalized citizens of citizenship. Now, in the new Trump administration, this project will be pursued with even greater zeal. Not only did Trump include a reference to revoking citizenship in his day-one executive orders, but Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, has stated that he expects the effort to be “turbocharged.”
One of the early cases that the first Trump administration used to test this new ramped-up denaturalization effort involved Baljinder Singh, who migrated to the United States as a 15- or 16-year-old in 1991 and filed an asylum petition the next year. Four years later, he married a US citizen and withdrew the asylum petition to apply for adjustment of status based on his marriage. His petition was approved, and five years after getting his green card, he applied for naturalization and became a citizen in 2006.
Twelve years later, the file was re-analyzed under Operation Janus, and the Trump administration alleged that there were two separate fingerprint records—one under Davinder Singh from September 25, 1991, and another under Baljinder Singh from January 24, 1992.The Trump administration argued in civil suit that Baljinder and Davinder were the same person and that Singh, therefore, must’ve lied and should have his citizenship revoked. Singh or an attorney representing him never appeared in court. The judge felt that the administration had satisfied the low burden for summary judgement and stripped Singh of his citizenship. A deportation order was issued in absentia. No one knows if Baljinder Singh is even aware that a judge revoked his citizenship in 2018.
There are lots of arguments that could have been made to challenge the Trump administration’s version of the facts, but immigration litigants, including those likely to be ensnared in the denaturalization purge, are rarely able to afford counsel. It is even less likely that they will be able to afford the costs of depositions, discovery, and other such investigations that accompany the civil litigation process. Add to this the low burden of proof, and you have a system that’s heavily weighted in favor of the government.
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Immigration enforcement is far more central to the second Trump administration than it was to the first. We can see this in how the administration has made ideological issues the basis of visa revocations. Such an agenda fits with the white Christian nationalism of many MAGA supporters, and it provides a legal route to cast out those citizens that they do not want in their imagined country. Making examples of errant citizens who are brown and Muslim—like the detained green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil—is just the sort of political spectacle that excites Trump’s MAGA base.
Furthermore, while Operation Janus has been limited to analyzing biometric fingerprint information, other ongoing operations such as Catch and Revoke, which uses artificial intelligence to monitor the speech and social media content of foreign nationals, could be turned toward naturalized citizens. Right now, a naturalized US citizen can have their electronic devices searched whenever they pass through the US border where Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure are suspended and then have that data become the basis of a denaturalization case. Even without border searches, the Trump administration could potentially use the civil discovery process to compel individuals to turn over social media posts and other digital data to administration lawyers. This data could then be scanned using AI, producing the justification to demand a revocation of citizenship.
In most cases, if those facing denaturalization threats can hire attorneys, they can win and keep their citizenship. But given the costs associated with the legal fight, hiring an lawyer could be impossible or lead to financial ruin. This means that the Trump administration could pursue such cases to cow and frighten naturalized US citizens who know that they could either face deportation or massive debt. The Trump administration wins either way.
A just legal regime for naturalized US citizens facing such cases would require that they be provided with legal counsel. And given that the loss of citizenship is such a heavy consequence, the government should have to prove facts “beyond a reasonable doubt” rather than only “clear and convincing.” Congress and the Supreme Court aren’t likely to take such steps. Unfettered and unrestrained, the Trump administration seems set target those with less than perfect records and make them the poster children for a denaturalization campaign. The Trump administration will label the criminals without providing them the rights afforded to those accused of actual crimes. The administration will aim to leave them silenced and drained of resources and, ultimately, deported to countries they fled or to mega-prisons in foreign countries.
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