Now They’re Coming for Your Citizenship

When the Trump administration tells you that they’re planning on doing something, it’s best to believe them … as long as the thing in question hurts people rather than helps anyone. Promised roll-outs of a new healthcare plan to replace Obamacare? That’s apparently never happening. Relief for ever-older and more haggard first-time homebuyers? You’re on your own. But if the administration tells you that it wants to target a certain demographic of Americans with punitive Justice Department action? Well, you know they’ll end up making time for that. And the just-announced newest target is U.S. citizens. Naturalized U.S. citizens, that is. According to new internal guidance for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, published by The New York Times, the offices have been given strict quotas to massively accelerate the pace of denaturalization–stripping of citizenship–from these naturalized U.S. citizens in 2026.

A naturalized citizen is someone born outside of the U.S., not born into citizenship, who ultimately obtained full U.S. citizenship after going through the years-long rigmarole of progressing through the labyrinthine American process for doing so. Once this citizenship has been obtained, there’s quite a high bar to revoke it–the government needs to demonstrate in a civil or criminal federal court case that not only was there fraud in the process of applying for citizenship, but that said fraud was “material,” and had an impact on whether the underlying citizenship claim was ultimately accepted. This is a pretty robust protection, determined by the U.S. Supreme Court relatively recently in 2017’s Maslenjak v. United States.

That’s what makes it so notable that the new instruction received by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.) tells the agency to simply find exponentially more offenders to refer to the Justice Department than it ever has before. From 2017-2025, there were only a total of 120 cumulative denaturalization cases that were filed, the majority happening during the first Donald Trump administration–during Biden’s term, only 24 total denaturalization cases were filed. The new guidance issued Tuesday, on the other hand, instructs U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices to “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” starting immediately in 2026.

In terms of percentages, it’s an absolutely absurd increase: The federal government is instructing one of its agencies that investigates the citizenship process to simply produce instances of fraud, without making any case to prove that such wide-ranging fraud even exists to be found. In the 9 year period of 2017-2025, the total of 120 denaturalization cases equals roughly 13 per year. The Trump administration is telling U.S.C.I.S. that it should immediately be finding ten times that figure per month (or well beyond 100x higher per year) to refer to the Justice Department for prosecution, each case of which requires a full trial by law. And even before potentially expanding their net and roping in more dubious cases, the existing rate of Justice Department success in these cases is far from impressive: Of the 13 denaturalization cases the Justice Department brought in 2025, they won eight of them. How low is that rate going to go when the cases become far more spurious as a result of U.S.C.I.S. being told that it needs to reach arbitrary, inflated quotas? How much federal court time is going to be wasted in 2026 as a result?

The Trump admin says it aims to file 100-200 denaturalization cases per month, a huge increase. But these cases are hard to file and win, and require a lot of DOJ resources, and the DOJ is incredibly stretched thin already. So we’ll see; I have serious doubts about their ability to do this.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) Dec 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM

Consequently, former U.S.C.I.S. employees seem to be universally skeptical that either their former organization or the Justice Department can pull much of this off, sharply clashing with current U.S.C.I.S. representatives, who are all too happy to sound like Stephen Miller acolytes claiming they want to “restore integrity.”

“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 U.S.C.I.S. spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser to NYT. “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.”

Former U.S.C.I.S. Chief of Staff for Refugee and International Operations, Ricky Murray, sang a different tune, telling Newsweek that the resources and laxness of definitions for fraud required by the plan would probably make it impossible for the organization to pull off.

“People who’ve been working on denaturalization programs and who worked in the field office recognize that the standard is extremely high, and the idea of actually being able to process anywhere near that number is just virtually impossible,” Murray said. “USCIS could send more cases to the Justice Department by lowering the threshold, but the DOJ’s burden and the standard required by the DOJ to bring these cases in federal court haven’t changed. So I don’t see how there’s going to be significantly more cases brought for denaturalization by the DOJ to the federal courts.”

What’s the point, then? Well, like so many other seemingly arbitrary but cruel Trump administration decisions, “fear” is probably half the intent. Intimidation is what Trump and his racist, Stephen Miller-esque gremlins are after, and they’re more emboldened now than they were the first time around, when there were more career bureaucrats in the Trump administration standing in his way from capriciously pursuing some of the agenda’s most blatantly racist ideas. Recall that in the entire first four-year Trump administration, there were roughly 100 total denaturalization proceedings. Now he wants his second admin to do that number every two to four weeks … not because there’s some great value to be obtained in targeting the specific U.S. citizens who will be the victims, but because they’re hoping that by targeting these people, they’ll discourage other “undesirables” from seeking citizenship in the first place. Are you going to be motivated to jump through all those legal hoops, if you know that the Trump administration might simply snatch your citizenship away one day? That’s why U.S.C.I.S. is being given arbitrary numbers of naturalized citizens to refer to the Justice Department for court cases: To help Trump’s terror campaign along.

“My fear would be that as we have seen in the arrest and removal context when D.H.S. employees are given arbitrary targets what happens is people who shouldn’t be swept up, get swept up and that you’re going to see that happening to people in this context as well,” said Margy O’Herron, a senior fellow at nonpartisan law organization the Brennan Center, to NYT. “That could incite fear and terror amongst naturalized citizens.”