DOJ announces plans to prioritize cases to revoke citizenship

The Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship. Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving district attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.

At least one person has already been denaturalized in recent weeks. On June 13, a judge ordered the revocation of the citizenship of Elliott Duke, who uses they/them pronouns. Duke is an American military veteran originally from the U.K. who was convicted for distributing child sexual abuse material — something they later admitted they were doing prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.

Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate wrote in the memo that pursuing denaturalization will be among the agency's top five enforcement priorities for the civil rights division.

The DOJ memo says that the federal government will pursue denaturalization cases via civil litigation — an especially concerning move, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

In civil proceedings, any individual subject to denaturalization is not entitled to an attorney, Robertson said; there is also a lower burden of proof for the government to reach, and it is far easier and faster to reach a conclusion in these cases.

According to this new memo, the DOJ is expanding its criteria of which crimes put individuals at risk of losing their citizenship. That includes national security violations and committing acts of fraud against individuals or against the government, like Paycheck Protection Program loan fraud or Medicaid or Medicare fraud.

Other immigration experts point to another part of the guidance, which gives U.S. attorneys broader discretion to determine other eligible denaturalization cases. "These categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case," the memo states, and priorities for denaturalization can include "any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue."