Procuring naturalization illegally simply means that the person was not eligible for naturalization in the first place. Accordingly, any eligibility requirement for naturalization that was not met can form the basis for an action to revoke the naturalization of a person. This includes the requirements of residence, physical presence, lawful admission for permanent residence, good moral character, and attachment to the U. B A person is subject to revocation of naturalization if there is deliberate deceit on the part of the person in misrepresenting or failing to disclose a material fact or facts on his or her naturalization application and subsequent examination.
This ground of revocation includes omissions as well as affirmative misrepresentations. The misrepresentations can be oral testimony provided during the naturalization interview or can include information contained on the application submitted by the applicant.
The courts determine whether the misrepresented or concealed fact or facts were material. The test for materiality is whether the misrepresentations or concealment had a tendency to affect the decision. In , a Customs and Border Protection agent discovered that more than people from four countries had become US citizens despite having past deportation orders — something that should have, legally, disqualified them from naturalization — because the deportation order was under one name and identity and the citizenship had been granted to another.
DHS subsequently launched a task force to figure out just how many fingerprint records it was missing from people who should be barred from citizenship. About half of the , print sets ultimately got digitized, but the department ran out of money before it could finish the job. This does not mean that there are hundreds of thousands of fraudulently naturalized citizens out there. It just means that any one set of missing fingerprints might theoretically match to someone who had become naturalized under a different identity.
In late , the government started accelerating its Operation Janus efforts again. The first successful denaturalization order under the operation was issued in January. In June , the director of USCIS, Cissna, announced that he was hiring a team of attorneys for a separate office in California for the purpose of investigating the remaining Operation Janus cases and making the necessary referrals to the Department of Justice for prosecution. If USCIS sticks to that mandate, the only people targeted will be people who were naturalized under a different identity since otherwise, their final orders or criminal records would have been found when they applied for citizenship under their real names.
The administration won the case in In November , the government went a step further: It sued to denaturalize five men who had each been convicted of sexual crimes against children after they had been naturalized — because those convictions had included criminal activity stretching back before their naturalizations.
That opens the awkward possibility that she might have won an acquittal — or been convicted of a lesser charge that might not have included information about things she did, or knew about, before becoming a US citizen. In , the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the government in a denaturalization case, Maslenjak v.
United States. The justices, both at oral argument and in the decision written by Justice Elena Kagan , were extremely concerned that the government was trying to over-broadly define what counted as a material lie. Otherwise, she points out, the standards for denaturalization will get decoupled from those of naturalization — leaving a lot of people in a very vulnerable position.
When it comes to lying, this means that not all lies open someone up to denaturalization, because not all lies disqualify them from naturalization. This is an important legal bound. It means that even though, in theory, the Trump administration could attempt to denaturalize people for the tiniest imaginable error — a typo, for example, in their naturalization application — it would have a difficult time sustaining that in court.
They know that being a US citizen was supposed to keep them safe, and that it may no longer do that. Over the past 20 years, immigration law has changed to make more legal immigrants deportable, while immigration policy has changed to make deportation a realistic fear for more immigrants.
During all this time, citizenship was assumed to be a firewall. Immigrants are reexamining and sometimes discarding that assumption now.
But should they? A lot of opponents of the Trump administration believe that the rule of law has been totally wiped away in everyday government decision-making — but that belief goes too far.
The law still prohibits the executive branch from doing some of the things immigrants fear. The assumption of bad faith runs to the core. When it comes to immigration, a lot of people are convinced that they know what the real game is.
You have to define it based on behavior, or even on identity. But Trump administration officials do. It is cracking down not just on unauthorized immigrants but on refugees, asylum seekers, and holders of Temporary Protected Status ; it seeks to overhaul the legal immigration system to cut tens of thousands of people seeking family-based visas out of line. Immigrants across the legal spectrum are aware of how vulnerable they are.
But their worry comes from a place far too deep to be calmed by promises that the law ought to protect them. In March , the government filed a civil denaturalization claim against Iyman Faris, a terrorist convicted of plotting to attack the Brooklyn Bridge. The government alleged that Faris was radicalized and trained before his move to the United States, meaning he gave a false statement on his citizenship application regarding his intentions in moving to the United States.
Faris is scheduled to be released from prison in , but DOJ officials are hoping the denaturalization case will complete before then. Congress has also introduced legislation that might expand the reasons by which an individual could be denaturalized. In February , Rep. Lee Zeldin R-NY introduced a bill that would enable the government to denaturalize people who were members or supporters of gangs, a measure meant to combat the operations of the MS gang.
Jeff Denham R-CA. While the latter two bills failed to pass the House of Representatives, Rep. Advocates have opposed such provisions, arguing that revoking citizenship based on actions taken after naturalization would violate the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution.
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