WASHINGTON: The Trump administration intends to increase its efforts to strip some naturalised Americans of their US citizenship, the New York Times reported, citing internal guidance.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services guidance, which was issued on Tuesday, asks its field offices to “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the upcoming 2026 fiscal year, according to the newspaper.
That would mark a dramatic increase in denaturalisation cases, which, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Centre, stood at about 11 per year between 1990 and 2017.
Under US law, a person can be denaturalised for several reasons, including illegally gaining US citizenship and misrepresenting a material fact during the naturalisation process. The timeline for denaturalisation cases varies, but they can take years to resolve.
A USCIS spokesperson said it was not a secret that the agency’s “war on fraud” prioritised people who unlawfully obtained US citizenship, particularly under the previous administration. “We will pursue denaturalisation proceedings for those individuals lying or misrepresenting themselves during the naturalisation process,” the spokesperson said.
US President Donald Trump has carried out an aggressive immigration agenda, including imposing travel bans and an attempt to end birthright citizenship, since January.
His administration most recently paused immigration applications, including green card and US citizenship processing, filed by immigrants from 19 non-European countries.
In interviews, some former agency officials expressed concern at the scale of the case goals for denaturalisation pushed by U.S.C.I.S. leadership.
“Imposing arbitrary numerical targets on denaturalisation cases risks politicising citizenship revocation,” said Sarah Pierce, a former U.S.C.I.S. official. “And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalisations in recent years turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”
Proponents of stricter immigration laws said it was necessary to more aggressively root out people who had been improperly granted citizenship.
There are about 26 million naturalised Americans in the country, according to the Census Bureau. More than 800,000 new citizens were sworn in last year, most of whom were born in Mexico, India, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic or Vietnam, U.S.C.I.S. statistics show. Most people stripped of their citizenship revert to being legal permanent residents.
