President Donald Trump’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is reportedly setting out an ambitious plan to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans who are found to have fraudulently secured the legal status.
The denaturalization plan, detailed in The New York Times, will be spearheaded by USCIS Director Joe Edlow and focus on referring 100 to 200 denaturalization cases every month to the agency’s Office of Immigration Litigation.
“If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department,” the Times reports:
Under federal law, people may be denaturalized only if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. But the Trump administration has shown a zeal for using every tool at its disposal to target legal and illegal immigrants, leading activists to warn that such a campaign could sweep up people who had made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork and sow fear among law-abiding Americans. [Emphasis added]
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“It’s no secret that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ war on fraud includes prioritizing those who’ve unlawfully obtained U.S. citizenship — especially under the previous administration,” said Matthew J. Tragesser, a U.S.C.I.S. spokesman. “We will pursue denaturalization proceedings for those individuals lying or misrepresenting themselves during the naturalization process. We look forward to continuing to work with the Department of Justice to restore integrity to America’s immigration system.” [Emphasis added]
In a prior interview with Breitbart News, Edlow criticized the Biden administration’s deregulation of the naturalization process, where security questions, for instance, were shortened in order to speed up the process for foreign nationals seeking naturalized American citizenship.
In fewer than four years, the Biden administration awarded citizenship to almost 3.5 million foreign nationals, which the Migration Policy Institute notes is “by far the most [naturalizations] of any single presidential term.”
For perspective, the number of foreign nationals who secured citizenship under Biden eclipses those who were awarded citizenship under former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, combined.
Edlow said at the time that there ought not to be quotas set for USCIS adjudicators regarding naturalizations.
“I don’t believe we should have quotas for how many naturalizations we do, how many adjustments we do,” Edlow told Breitbart News. “I want to make sure that the adjudicators are taking the proper amount of time to really screen and vet these individuals to make the determination that they are, in fact, qualified for the benefits that they are applying, including and most importantly, for naturalization.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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