The Rabbit Hole: The (Un)Making of Americans

Editor’s Note: Every year, more than 800,000 individuals in the United States take the oath to become citizens of the land of opportunity. American citizenship comes with its own benefits and advantages, but what happens to those who pledge their allegiance under purported false pretenses? In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporters Peter Beck and Gigi Liman trace the century-long history of cases in the federal dockets where U.S. citizenship is revoked to examine what it means to be an American and how increasingly tenuous that right may be. -Seamus

With just a week left before July 4th, it was a sweltering day in the South Carolina summer heat, but throngs of families, many of whom carried miniature American flags, had formed beneath a centuries-old oak tree at Middleton Plantation. Roughly 155 years after the abolition of slavery in the U.S., an assortment of people born in 33 different countries had gathered at the plantation not to learn about the history of its enslaved people or its one-time owner, Arthur Middleton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but to become naturalized citizens of the country Middleton helped create.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Gergel was on hand to preside over the ceremony and delivered a brief speech about the importance of citizenship and the lasting ideals of the founding fathers ahead of the holiday. All told, 68 people became naturalized as U.S. citizens after navigating a convoluted process of tests and bureaucratic forms before finally taking an oath of allegiance. 

Judge Gergel said the ceremonies were the favorite part of his job. One woman, who was born in Poland, expressed her excitement to a local reporter, “I’m going to vote and I sorta, kinda want to do jury [duty],” she said. The families of the new U.S. citizens were similarly ecstatic. The event had been planned to coincide with Arthur Middleton’s 277th birthday.

Around three million people immigrate to the United States each year, but less than a million are naturalized, which completes the legal process of obtaining U.S. citizenship. But an even smaller number of new U.S. citizens, ranging each year of the modern era from zero to dozens, are stripped of their hard-earned citizenship through a process called denaturalization. To revoke an American's U.S. citizenship does not entail a federal agent signing an administrative form, an immigration judge ordering somebody deported, or even an executive order. The Department of Justice has to go to federal court.

In June 2025, five months into the second Trump administration, the Justice Department released a memorandum addressed to its Civil Division that it would do just that. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote that denaturalizations would become a top-five priority for the Civil Division and that the department would “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.” The memo went on to list ten types of cases to prioritize for denaturalization, the first of which was for “[c]ases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism, espionage, or the unlawful export from the United States of sensitive goods, technology, or information raising national security concerns.”

Historically, denaturalization cases were reserved for people who lied about grave conduct during the naturalization process. War criminals and perpetrators of human rights abuses, who lied or concealed on immigration forms about their activities before moving to the U.S., were targeted as a testament that the U.S. would not allow such abusers to take refuge in America. Only a few hundred people have been denaturalized since 1967.

During the Obama administration, denaturalization became a political issue after it was revealed that the government had failed to upload fingerprints of individuals who had been deported in the 1990s, some of whom came back into the U.S. and were naturalized under false identities. It was also a heated topic of the Global War on Terror as policymakers debated whether to allow U.S. citizens who traveled overseas to join terrorist groups to re-enter the U.S. Yet even then, and during the first Trump administration, denaturalization cases were few and far between, with the high point of 90 cases in a single year coming in 2018, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Law News. The Biden administration also continued the trend of little to no cases.

This piece is part of our weekly Sunday Series we call The Rabbit Hole where we choose a single federal court docket, filing, or topic and dive deep into the details. You can read past issues on topics ranging from news deserts to the lack of consistent funding for court-appointed defense attorneys on our site. Normally, these Rabbit Hole pieces are behind a paywall to reflect the time and expense associated with their reporting.

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But the Justice Department’s June 2025 directive and its mention of national security in particular raised alarm bells for outside watchdog groups. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers put out a statement: “The Trump Administration’s push to revoke citizenship is alarming, and raises serious Fourteenth Amendment concerns … In effect, this directive sends the message that those not born in the United States risk losing their citizenship for previous or future conduct, creating an unacceptable threat that a criminal charge could rip them from their communities. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the government invokes unsubstantiated claims of gang affiliation or uses an individual’s criminal record to claim that citizenship was illegally procured.” And that same month, The Atlantic published an article titled, “Naturalized Citizens Are Scared.”

Later, in October 2025, the concern resurfaced following President Trump’s designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization. At the time, the designation for Antifa as a domestic terror organization lacked the same statutory architecture as the foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation that the U.S. government has applied to more traditional terror groups, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. However, experts warned that a subsequent designation by Trump of Antifa as an FTO could lead to grave civil liberty outcomes, in which left-leaning naturalized U.S. citizens are stripped of their citizenship for participating in “Antifa” aligned activities: a list that reportedly includes attending protests and donating to legal defense funds.

So what exactly does the government have to do in court to strip someone of their most basic Constitutional right? And how has the Trump administration’s effort to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” looked amidst its broader immigration crackdown?

In court, the Justice Department must prove that a person’s U.S. citizenship was unlawfully procured. This can occur if an individual was not eligible for naturalization at the time they became a U.S. citizen, or if citizenship was procured through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation. In other words, the person either did not meet the legal requirements or intentionally provided false or misleading information prior to the naturalization process. 

Among the requirements for naturalization are being at least 18 years old, holding lawful permanent resident status, demonstrating proficiency in English, having knowledge of U.S. history and social studies and government, and possessing “good moral character,” according to section 1451(a) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act. Accordingly, if a person did not meet any of these or effectively lied during the naturalization process, their citizenship status may be removed. 

In limited circumstances, post-naturalization conduct can also be grounds for denaturalization. If an individual becomes a member of or affiliated with any organization in the five years after naturalization that would have at the time of naturalization prevented them from becoming a citizen, this can be evidence that the person was “not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization,” according to section 1451(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. 

Part of what makes denaturalization a powerful weapon is the nature of the proceedings. They are almost always filed as civil actions rather than criminal indictments. For these cases, there is no right to appointed counsel, no jury, and no statute of limitations, leaving naturalized citizens perpetually exposed to the possibility of their citizenship being revoked. The burden of proof is higher than the typical civil standard of “a preponderance of the evidence” but lower than the criminal threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead, it sits in a gray area called "clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence.”

Denaturalization was once a common practice in the U.S. One of the first and to this day most prominent cases of denaturalization was that of anarchist Emma Goldman, denaturalized just three years after the Naturalization Act of 1906 was established. At the time, foreign-born citizens could be denaturalized not only for illegal procurement of citizenship but also for voting in foreign elections, failing to enlist in the military, and for women, being married to a non-citizen, among others. 

For decades, the U.S. targeted Asian and German-born citizens as well as those who spoke out against World Wars I and II. But starting in the 1940s, the Supreme Court began placing more significant limits on the government’s power to denaturalize citizens. In 1943, the Justice Department argued that William Schneiderman’s allegiance with the Communist Party at the time of his naturalization retroactively proved that his sworn commitment to the Constitution was invalid. The Supreme Court refused to accept that inference. The Constitution “did not forge a political straitjacket for the generations to come,” the Court wrote in its majority opinion. It held that such a right, once granted, should not be taken away without the “clearest sort of justification and proof,” and Schneiderman’s membership in the Communist Party did not meet such standard. The Court similarly ruled that citizenship could not be revoked on the basis of offensive or unpopular opinions or allegiances alone on a slew of cases during these years.

This culminated in the Court’s 1967 decision in Afroyim v. Rusk, which declared citizenship an absolute right under the Fourteenth Amendment—even for naturalized citizens. In this case, the Court held that a foreign-born citizen voting in an Israeli election after naturalization was not justifiable grounds to revoke his citizenship, striking down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for such acts and overruling a decade-earlier decision upholding the law. In ruling that Congress does not have the power to “take away an American’s citizenship without his assent,” the Court effectively limited the circumstances under which citizenship could be revoked to the standard accepted today. No longer could the government revoke citizenship for any reason other than it having been fraudulently or illegally procured.

The impact on the number of denaturalizations was stark. Before the 1967 decision, roughly 22,000 people had been denaturalized since the Goldman case in 1906. In its aftermath, denaturalizations plummeted to an average of just 11 cases a year—until now.

The Court entrenched this precedent in 1988 (Kungys v. United States) when it established that § 1451(a) requires a causal link between false statements and the decision to grant citizenship. It ruled that any concealment or misrepresentation of fact(s) must have been “sufficiently relevant” to qualification for citizenship such that the true facts, if they were known at the time, would have either warranted the denial of citizenship or led to a further investigation during which other disqualifying facts would have been discovered. The Court again reaffirmed this precedent in 2017 when it ruled that misrepresentation in the naturalization process alone is not legally disqualifying for citizenship.

Given the high bar set by Afroyim v. Rusk and Kungys v. United States, the Justice Department has traditionally prioritized cases in which people had blatantly lied or gone to great lengths to conceal their past lives. The most notable were the war criminals, such as a 79-year-old aircraft mechanic who lived in St. Peters, Missouri, after lying about his time as an S.S. guard at a concentration camp near Berlin. 

Several fighters from the Bosnian War had their U.S. citizenship revoked more recently, including one who beat 12 civilians with wooden bats before locking them in a morgue without food and light for five days, and another who was a member of a firing squad that massacred 22 unarmed civilians. In 2024, federal prosecutors filed a complaint to denaturalize a guard at the notorious Čelebići camp, where prisoners were subjected to torture, starvation, sexual assault, and killed. The former guard was also sentenced to five years in a federal prison for concealing his role in the abuse on immigration forms.

The Trump administration has now broadened the cases that the Justice Department pursues by extending the “good moral character” standard to cover bad acts committed during the naturalization process, beyond a person simply lying or concealing information about their identity. The move increases the usual consequences people face for crimes, such as prison or probation, which are theoretically intended to remove and rehabilitate people to rejoin society. Instead, the denaturalization process threatens to remove people from their communities indefinitely.

One includes a woman whose citizenship was stripped after she was sentenced to five years in prison for a multimillion-dollar Medicare fraud scheme that overlapped with her naturalization. The woman had been out of prison for nearly a decade. Another case focused on a man who allegedly lied about living with his U.S. citizen spouse during the immigration process. And in February 2026, the Justice Department announced that it would file a denaturalization complaint against the former mayor of North Miami, who prosecutors say lived in the U.S. under a fake identity and married a U.S. citizen to live here as a permanent resident, despite being already married to a Haitian citizen. The former mayor has been a U.S. citizen for 20 years.

To be sure, denaturalization efforts are not limited to fraudsters. Federal prosecutors have also targeted people with significant violent criminal records. A 25-year-old Peruvian-born sex offender, who admitted to downloading over 600 images of child abuse materials before being naturalized, is among the defendants whose citizenship has been revoked by a judge. In June 2025, the Justice Department successfully sought the denaturalization of a U.S. Army soldier, who told an immigration officer under oath in January 2013 that he had never committed a crime for which he was not arrested and later confessed to receiving and distributing child abuse materials before his 2013 testimony. Similarly, a U.S. Marine who allegedly exchanged inappropriate messages with an apparent underage girl online in 2015, but who was actually an undercover officer, is having his U.S. citizenship contested. 

All of these cases and others were highlighted by the Justice Department in press releases. In the mayor’s case, Assistant Attorney General Shumate said, “This Administration will not permit fraudsters and tricksters who cheat their way to the gift of U.S. citizenship … The passage of time does not diminish blatant immigration fraud.” In another, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “American citizenship is a sacred privilege—not a cheap status that can be obtained dishonestly.”

One case that the Department of Justice didn’t issue their now-standard denaturalization press release for was Vanessa Ben. In 2018, the Houston-area grandmother and longtime accountant went through the naturalization process as immigration officers questioned whether she met the “good moral character” necessary for U.S. citizenship. In 2019, however, she was charged with tax fraud for underreporting her income. She had received less than an $8,000 refund, which she paid an IRS fine for, and was sentenced to a year in prison. Then, this past year, the Justice Department asked for a judge to revoke her U.S. citizenship, more than five years after her prison sentence would have concluded.

While the Supreme Court deliberates on the question of birthright citizenship, there are clear signs that the Trump administration has found another law enforcement tool to undo citizenship. 

A new website for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outlines the budding strategy, stating, “Everyone who applies for naturalization must truthfully answer a series of questions to show that they have the good moral character required to become a U.S. citizen.” The first of those questions asks whether a person has ever committed a crime or offense for which they were not arrested. ICE states further, “When people lie on their immigration forms, ICE uses its authorities to find, prosecute[,] and remove them.”

If the administration’s strategy is to revoke the citizenship of anyone who broke the law before or recently after being naturalized, the implications could be broader than just war criminals, pedophiles, and fraudsters. There may be other targets for denaturalization who have already paid their debt in order to rejoin society, through prison, probation, community service, or another form of punishment.

The past year of denaturalization cases has proven that the legal process is viable, the law enforcement tool is available, but how it’s wielded is simply subject to the policy whims of whatever political party holds office. 

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This piece was part of our weekly Sunday Series we call The Rabbit Hole where we choose a single federal court docket, filing, or topic and dive deep into the details. You can read past issues on topics ranging from news deserts to the lack of consistent funding for court-appointed defense attorneys on our site.

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