A dozen lawyers work in a tiny office within the Justice Department’s Civil Division that most Americans are unaware of. They spend their days searching through old naturalization files for false information. Quietly, that office has been there for years. It’s no longer silent. A senior DOJ official stated that the department now intends to file at least 250 denaturalization cases by October, a rate that would be unprecedented in the unit’s recent history.
To put the scale in perspective, Syracuse University’s data clearinghouse reports that the government filed 166 denaturalization complaints overall between 2008 and this past June, or less than ten per year on average. Over a four-year period, the Biden administration filed 24. The current administration has already filed 29 in less than two months of this year. That is not a small change. It’s completely different equipment.
Reading through the cases themselves is similar to going through old case files in a dusty courthouse basement because they often follow a pattern. A clinic owner who was born in Cuba is accused of charging insurance companies almost $37 million for therapy that was never given. A Connecticut man was found guilty of child abuse years after he became a naturalized citizen; the abuse occurred before he applied for citizenship. An executive from a staffing company is accused of forging signatures on applications for H-1B visas. Every complaint is based on the same legal theory: that the individual lied under oath during the naturalization interview, typically in response to the typical question about whether they had committed any crimes for which they had not been arrested.
The mechanics of this expansion are not as neat behind the scenes as the press releases imply. According to reports, the department has drawn political appointees and civil litigators from fraud divisions to the endeavor, and the already overburdened US attorney’s offices are taking on more referrals. It’s the kind of resource reorganization that begs the question, “What gets deprioritized so this can move faster?” No matter how quickly cases are filed, the litigation itself—depositions, discovery, and courtroom time—will continue to be a bottleneck, according to Justice Connection’s Stacey Young, who worked at DOJ during multiple administrations. That seems correct. Courts don’t proceed as quickly as a press conference.
Not to be overlooked is the generational context in this case as well. Denaturalization has always been framed legally as a limited tool, used historically against war criminals, Nazi collaborators, and those who concealed atrocities or lied about their identities. In the last ten years alone, nearly 8 million people have become naturalized. Daniel Kanstroom, a law professor at Boston College, has described the current emphasis as “potentially worrisome,” but he has refrained from calling it alarming, pointing out that the cases that have been filed thus far largely resemble those that previous administrations pursued. To be honest, no one has yet to provide an answer to the question of whether that holds true as volume rises.
Officials from the administration maintain that the standard is still high. According to a senior DOJ official, the focus is on serious fraud and concealed crimes; a parking ticket won’t lead to an investigation.
Opponents respond that because the statute permits it, some lawyers in the department are now under pressure to pursue thinner cases—disputes over how paperwork was completed, not just hidden felonies.
The tension that lies beneath all of this is difficult to ignore: a legal authority that has been quietly in place for decades is suddenly being used on a scale that no one has ever thoroughly tested. Any person who loses their citizenship faces serious consequences, such as returning to permanent residency or possibly facing deportation. It won’t be evident until the fall deadline arrives and the courts begin to weigh in whether 250 cases becomes the new normal or turns out to be a high-water mark shaped by litigation reality.
