Donald Trump’s administration is planning to push the Department of Justice to strip hundreds of foreign-born Americans of their citizenship.
The DOJ has already added 384 individuals who were born outside the U.S to a list of citizens it wants denaturalized, according to a report by The New York Times on Thursday.
Even for Trump’s deportation-obsessed administration, denaturalization is rare, and has previously been used against foreign-born Americans after committing certain crimes or who conducted fraud, such as a false marriage in pursuit of immigrating to the U.S.
Senior DOJ officials were advised in a meeting last week that civil litigators in 39 U.S. attorneys’ regional offices would be assigned to file the denaturalization cases, an official told the Times. It is not clear why the 384 individuals have been singled out.
The denaturalization process is usually handled by legal experts versed in immigration litigation, with the government required to present evidence to a federal judge, slowing down the process.
Civil divisions at attorney’s offices generally deal with healthcare fraud, forfeiting of assets, and the enforcement of civil rights, which they will now have less time to focus on.
The move is part of a broader effort by the DOJ to “ramp up” denaturalizations, according to two sources cited by the Times. It follows Trump administration officials ordering Department of Homeland Security staffers to refer over 200 denaturalization cases a month to the DOJ.
In the years between 2017 and the end of 2025, just over 120 naturalized Americans were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Times.
During the meeting last week, Francey Hakes, the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, said the 384 cases earmarked are merely “the first wave of cases” intended for denaturalization.
Hakes flagged that many civil divisions at U.S. attorneys’ offices are already swamped by lawsuits filed by immigrants challenging the legality of their detention under the Trump administration’s ICE crackdown.
“I hope these cases will not be too much of an additional burden,” Hakes said, noting that the focus on denaturalization was a “White House initiative.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Times, “This isn’t a White House initiative—it’s federal law.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the DOJ and the White House for comment.
DOJ spokesman Matthew Tragesser confirmed to the Times that offices were “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history.”
“The Department of Justice is laser focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process,” he added.
“Citizenship fraud is a serious crime; anyone who has broken the law and obtained citizenship through fraud and deceit will be held accountable,” Jackson told the Times.
When a person is denaturalized in America, they revert to the status they held before becoming a citizen, which can open the door to deportation efforts.
The plan has been in the pipeline since a Justice Department memo from last June that instructed staff to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”.
It included a large range of categories of people to be stripped of their citizenship, including those accused of being gang or cartel members or having a “nexus to terrorism.”
