DOJ Memo Signals Renewed Push to Strip Naturalized Americans of Citizenship

The U.S. Department of Justice is moving to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship as part of President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigration, according to an internal memo.

DOJ leadership directed its civil attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving national security violations, fraud against the government, and a range of other crimes, according to Noticias Telemundo. The memo, signed by Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, identifies denaturalization as one of the Civil Division's top five enforcement priorities.

"The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence," Shumate wrote.

The Justice Department has already begun acting on the directive. As reported by NPR, a federal judge stripped Elliott Duke — an Army vet originally from the United Kingdom — of his U.S. citizenship on June 13 after being convicted of distributing child sexual abuse material. Duke's case falls under the new criteria outlined in the memo.

Legal experts say the DOJ's new guidance signals a significant ramp-up in the federal government's use of denaturalization, a practice with a complicated and often politically motivated past in the United States.

"At the height of denaturalization, there were about 22,000 cases filed per year — and this was when the overall population was much smaller," Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and co-author of Un(Civil) Denaturalization, told NPR.

Robertson noted that the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Afroyim v. Rusk ruled involuntary denaturalization unconstitutional in most cases, calling it "inconsistent with the American form of democracy." Following that decision, denaturalization became rare, with only a handful of cases heard annually.

That changed under President Barack Obama, whose administration began using digital tools to identify possible cases of naturalization fraud. Under President Trump's first term, Robertson points out that the Justice Department expanded the program further, shifting many denaturalization efforts from criminal prosecutions to civil court proceedings — where defendants are not entitled to a court-appointed attorney.

Robertson warned that using civil litigation to revoke citizenship raises serious constitutional concerns.

"Stripping Americans of citizenship through civil litigation violates due process and undermines the protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment," she told NPR.

The June 11 memo also gives prosecutors broad discretion beyond the listed criteria. According to the document, "These categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case," and the division may target "any other cases referred... that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue."

That open-ended language worries immigration advocates, who say it could allow the government to expand denaturalization beyond extreme or clearly defined cases.

"To see that this administration is plotting out how they're going to expand its use in ways we've not seen before is very shocking and very concerning," said Sameera Hafiz, policy director at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. "It is, in a way, trying to create a second class of U.S. citizens" — one in which Americans born abroad remain vulnerable to losing their citizenship.