Federal prosecutors in 39 regional offices have been assigned to pursue citizenship revocation cases
The United States Department of Justice has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it is seeking to revoke, marking the opening phase of what officials say will be an aggressive and historically unprecedented denaturalization campaign. The effort, confirmed Today, represents the highest volume of such referrals the department has ever pursued.
Senior officials disclosed during a recent internal meeting that civil litigators across 39 regional offices would be assigned to file cases against the identified individuals in the coming weeks. The reasons the department targeted those 384 people have not been publicly disclosed.
What the law allows
Under federal law, citizenship can be revoked if it was obtained through fraud, including sham marriages, false declarations, or concealment of disqualifying information. People convicted of certain crimes may also face denaturalization. In all cases, the government is required to present evidence before a judge, making the process both resource-intensive and legally complex.
Historically, denaturalization has been handled by immigration specialists within the Justice Department rather than by prosecutors spread across regional offices. Between 1990 and 2018, the government brought just 305 such cases in total. Between 2017 and late 2025, just over 120 naturalized citizens were stripped of their citizenship.
The scale of the current push marks a sharp break from that pattern.
A White House initiative
The Justice Department’s communications deputy, Matthew Tragesser, described the push as a product of close coordination with immigration agencies and said the department’s filed referrals in a single year had already surpassed the total from the entire previous administration. A top department official described the 384 individuals as representing only the first wave of cases, with significantly more to follow.
A White House spokesperson, however, pushed back on characterizations of the effort as a White House initiative, saying it reflects existing federal law rather than a new directive from the executive office.
The current campaign follows directives issued months ago that instructed the Department of Homeland Security to refer more than 200 denaturalization cases per month to the Justice Department. In December, the Trump administration formally directed the agency to accelerate those referrals, a move experts said opened the door for a broader expansion of the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.
Legal questions and resource strain
When a person is denaturalized, they revert to the immigration status they held before obtaining citizenship. Because immigration is a civil matter under US law, those facing denaturalization have no guaranteed right to an attorney, which legal experts say creates significant vulnerability for the individuals targeted.
Experts have warned that the administration’s broad framing of who qualifies for denaturalization, a list that includes people with a claimed connection to terrorism as well as alleged gang and cartel members, may be susceptible to legal challenge. The Trump administration has previously faced criticism for falsely identifying immigrants as gang members, often based on limited or disputed evidence.
The sheer volume of cases is also expected to strain the Justice Department’s resources. Officials have noted that prosecutors assigned to denaturalization work may be pulled from other areas including healthcare fraud investigations. Other civil division attorneys may be brought in to absorb the added caseload.
A longer history
Denaturalization is not new to American law, but its use has shifted considerably over time. Throughout much of the 20th century, journalists, labor organizers, and political activists were targeted on grounds of alleged anarchism or communist affiliation. That era of politically motivated denaturalization largely ended after the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship could only be revoked for fraud or willful misrepresentation.
More recent enforcement focused on former war criminals, including individuals who concealed Nazi affiliations to obtain citizenship. Efforts expanded under the Obama administration and accelerated further during the first Trump term, when the department moved to examine roughly 700,000 immigration files.
The current push, described internally as still in its early stages, signals that the second Trump administration intends to go further still.