In July 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice is pressing ahead with the largest denaturalization campaign in nearly a century. The administration plans to file at least 250 citizenship-revocation lawsuits in federal court by October — a figure nearly ten times the Biden administration's four-year total (24 cases), and greater than the entire tally of Trump's first term (roughly 168 cases).
This is not a sudden turn. It is a decade-long process of incremental executive expansion across two Trump administrations — turning a tool once reserved for war crimes and terrorism into a routine weapon of immigration enforcement.
Denaturalization: A Power That Was Never Meant to Be Used Often
U.S. federal law allows the government to strip a person of citizenship in one specific circumstance: when that person obtained citizenship through fraud or false representation — using a false identity during the naturalization process, for example, or concealing a disqualifying criminal record.
The boundaries of this power were set by a 1967 Supreme Court ruling, which held that the government may revoke citizenship only in cases of fraud or "willful misrepresentation." The backdrop to that decision was the government's Cold War-era abuse of denaturalization against political opponents on a mass scale — from the two world wars through the 1950s, some 22,000 immigrants were stripped of U.S. citizenship for political reasons. Labor leaders, journalists, and government critics accused of being communists were all targets of this tool.
The Court's holding was unambiguous: citizenship is precious, and must not be lightly taken away. In the decades that followed, successive administrations honored that principle. Denaturalization cases were aimed principally at national security threats, members of terrorist organizations, and suspected war criminals. Between 1990 and 2017, an average of only eleven cases a year were filed. Republican and Democratic administrations alike treated this power as one to be used sparingly — never as a routine instrument of immigration enforcement.
Trump's Two-Step Expansion
The turning point came in Trump's first term. After becoming president in 2016, the Trump administration widened the scope of denaturalization from national security and terrorism to non-terrorism domains such as fraud and violent crime. Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered an investigation of 700,000 naturalized citizens, with the goal of bringing roughly 1,600 cases to court. Those targets were ultimately never fully met — the Justice Department filed about 168 cases over four years — but that was already far above the levels of the Obama and Bush years.
If step one was "widening the scope," then step two was "acceleration." Less than a week after returning to office in 2025, Trump ordered that "adequate resources" be devoted to denaturalizing certain U.S. citizens. Months later, the Justice Department issued a memo directing the Civil Division — the unit primarily responsible for handling denaturalization cases — to "prioritize and aggressively pursue denaturalization proceedings."
As of July 22, 2026, the Justice Department had filed at least 89 denaturalization suits in federal court — nearly four times the Biden administration's four-year total. In a statement, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin declared: "If you commit fraud in the naturalization process, you forfeit the right to keep your U.S. citizenship." In a July 20 post on X, the White House called the effort "the largest denaturalization operation in history."
Unlike in the first term, second-term cases are no longer handled by the Justice Department's Civil Division alone. A substantial share has been taken up by U.S. Attorneys' Offices across the country. Former DOJ attorneys note that this procedural shift is "highly unusual" — it means federal prosecutors are being mobilized, with significant resources redirected, to drive this agenda forward.
The Character and Boundaries of the Cases
Judging from the cases filed so far, the Trump administration's target pool has not been chosen at random.
In most cases, the Justice Department cites criminal convictions on serious charges — sexual abuse, telecom fraud, drug trafficking. Other cases involve defendants who used false names during the naturalization process. In several cases, the government alleges that defendants participated in war crimes or supported foreign terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab.
Immigration experts and former DOJ attorneys say the allegations themselves look unremarkable — but the sheer surge in the total caseload is itself a qualitative change.
"At first glance, these cases do not look very different from those brought by past administrations," observes Daniel Kanstroom, an immigration law professor at Boston College. He adds that the Justice Department appears to be targeting people who have "pleaded guilty to crimes committed before or during the naturalization process" — under the government's logic, such people should never have received citizenship in the first place, because they fail the "good moral character" requirement. The problem is that once a guilty plea becomes the standard trigger for revocation proceedings, every "old debt left unexamined for decades" becomes a debt that can be called in.
The Twin Bottlenecks of Resources and Efficiency
The biggest obstacle to this agenda is not the law — it is resources. Denaturalization cases are "a grinding process," in the words of former DOJ attorney Stacey Young: "The volume of evidence is enormous, discovery is heavy, and the cases often go to trial or into appeals."
Every single case demands years of time and substantial attorney resources from the Justice Department. Even as the Trump administration pushes denaturalization, the department is contending with a wave of departures among government lawyers and a record case backlog driven by legal challenges to the White House's deportation campaign. Federal prosecutors, Young warns, are "already overwhelmed" — driving denaturalization may leave them unable to focus on litigating healthcare fraud, environmental crimes, corruption, or national security cases.
More decisively, even when the government wins, deportation does not necessarily follow. By law, defendants revert to their prior status — typically lawful permanent residents — and enjoy due process rights, including the right to a hearing before an immigration judge. "To remove them, you have to go through a completely separate set of proceedings," Young says.
That means every "successful" denaturalization case requires a double judicial process: round one revokes citizenship, round two handles removal. With judicial resources already strained, this efficiency dilemma — winning the case does not guarantee deportation — makes the annual target of 250 cases enormously difficult to execute in practice.
The Signal Matters More Than the Substance
If denaturalization is so inefficient in practice, why is the White House pushing it with such fanfare?
The answer may lie at the level of signaling. The United States has more than 26 million naturalized citizens. Even if those actually stripped of citizenship amount to a tiny fraction, the Justice Department's public drive for "the largest denaturalization operation in history" is itself a signal — telling those 26 million people that the paper they obtained can, in the Trump administration's view, be taken back.
"I don't think this will have any material effect on this administration's deportation goals," Young says, "but I do think it sends the signal that naturalized citizenship is impermanent, and precarious."
The strategy fits neatly with Trump's "reality-TV politics." It is not really about denaturalizing and deporting 250 people a year — its core function is narrative construction: showing that the government is doing something. On immigration, "protecting the integrity of the naturalization process" is an almost unassailable position in domestic politics — whoever opposes "cracking down on fraudulent naturalization" is, by implication, supporting "illegal immigration." Within that narrative frame, actual enforcement efficiency hardly matters.
Three Forks: Legislative, Judicial, and Executive
Even as the executive branch accelerates, this expansion faces constraints along three fronts.
The judicial front: Immigration lawyers and former DOJ officials agree that federal judges will handle every denaturalization case "with extreme caution." Kanstroom's assessment: "The case law is very clear — citizenship is precious and should not be taken away lightly." As long as the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling stands, every denaturalization case must satisfy the strict standard of fraud or willful misrepresentation.
The legislative front: Several Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced more radical bills this year. Texas Representative Chip Roy has proposed stripping citizenship from "advocates of socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism." Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt has proposed that anyone convicted of a serious felony within ten years of naturalization be subject to denaturalization. These bills are not expected to become law — but their very introduction shows that Republicans are widening the zone of political acceptability around "denaturalization."
The social front: The more hidden consequence is a chilling effect among the naturalized-citizen population. Even if only a small number ultimately lose their citizenship, members of immigrant communities with criminal records (however old) may, out of fear, avoid normal interactions with the government — renewing a green card, applying for a U.S. passport, even voting. When a once-rare tool is used frequently, the mere existence of the tool has already changed the environment of behavior.