The Justice Department chose a revealing title for Monday’s announcement: “Justice Department Moves to Strip Citizenship from 40 Criminals”. “Criminals” reaches the reader before the department explains that these are civil complaints. Many of the people named have been convicted of serious crimes. The separate question in these cases is whether the government can prove that each person obtained citizenship illegally or through a material lie.
The department filed the 40 cases between August 21 and October 2. No judge has yet ruled on those denaturalization claims. Nevertheless, Attorney General Todd Blanche called the campaign “the largest denaturalization effort in modern history.” His department is measuring success in volume before it has won the cases.
The danger lies in the scale. Denaturalization is a legitimate but severe remedy for citizenship obtained unlawfully. Donald Trump and Blanche are turning it into a numbers game.
A narrow remedy gets a mass operation
Federal law allows a court to cancel naturalization when citizenship was illegally procured or obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation. That standard matters. If the government can prove that someone lied under oath about conduct that made them ineligible, it has a case. Citizenship is too important for either fraud or revocation to be treated casually.
The administration’s scale changes the risk. The New York Times reported, through the Guardian’s April account, that the Justice Department had identified at least 384 foreign born citizens for possible denaturalization and assigned civil litigators in 39 regional offices. Justice Department official Francey Hakes called the list “the first wave of cases” and described the push as “a White House initiative.” The White House answered that it was federal law. The statute authorizes the cases. The White House initiative determines how aggressively the department brings them.
For comparison, CBS reported that the government filed an average of 11 denaturalization complaints a year from 1990 through 2017. The Guardian reported that just over 120 people were denaturalized from 2017 through late 2025. Forty complaints in six weeks, backed by hundreds of names and dozens of offices, are not routine casework.
DOJ ordered lawyers to maximize the cases
Congress left the statutory grounds for revoking citizenship unchanged. The June 2025 Civil Division memo changed the department’s posture by ordering lawyers to “prioritize and maximally pursue” denaturalization proceedings.
The memo’s ten priority categories include undisclosed felonies, national security cases, financial fraud, pending criminal charges and any other referral the Civil Division considers “sufficiently important to pursue.” It also says those categories do not limit the division and that lawyers may bring cases outside them. Every action still needs a legal basis and evidence. An enforcement policy this broad gives political leaders enormous discretion over which naturalized citizens receive years of their lives under a microscope.
That discretion is why the “40 Criminals” headline matters. A crime committed after naturalization does not automatically prove that citizenship was fraudulently obtained. The statute asks what was illegal, concealed or misrepresented when citizenship was granted. By leading with the ugliest convictions, DOJ encourages the public to collapse two different questions into one: whether someone committed a terrible crime and whether the government can lawfully undo that person’s naturalization.
Serious defendants still require serious proof
The department picked cases that make skepticism politically expensive. Its showcase defendant is Jinchao Wei, a former Navy sailor sentenced to more than 16 years for spying for China. Prosecutors say he began plotting to sell military secrets before he naturalized in May 2022 and concealed that conduct. The department’s release also describes people convicted of child sexual abuse, money laundering and identity fraud.
Those facts give the government a strong argument. These defendants can answer the complaints in federal court. Judges will review evidence. If DOJ proves by the required standard that a person obtained citizenship illegally, revocation follows from a law that long predates Trump.
The ugly convictions do not justify celebrating the size of the list. The Supreme Court warned in Schneiderman v. United States that citizenship already conferred should be taken only with “the clearest sort of justification and proof.” The Court required evidence that is clear, unequivocal and convincing, rather than a bare preponderance. In that 1943 case, the government tried to revoke a Communist Party member’s citizenship twelve years after naturalization. The Court refused because suspicion about his beliefs did not meet the burden.
In Afroyim v. Rusk, the Court held that Congress cannot strip citizenship without the citizen’s assent and quoted an earlier ruling that a naturalized citizen stands “on the footing of a native.” Fraud at the time of naturalization remains grounds for revocation. Political officials still do not get to treat lawful citizenship as probation.
Citizenship cannot become a scoreboard
Denaturalization is a civil judgment with consequences far beyond a corrected form. CBS notes that a person who loses citizenship returns to a prior immigration status and loses citizenship’s protection from deportation. That can put removal next in line. The government may have the evidence to justify that result in some or all of these cases. It should prove each one without boasting about the number of Americans targeted.
Blanche could have announced 40 filings and explained the evidence. Instead he claimed a modern record. His department could have described a careful application of a grave remedy. Instead it called the defendants “40 Criminals” and paired them with a 384 person first wave.
Justice must be measured case by case, by whether the government can prove that each certificate was unlawfully obtained. A department that respects citizenship would understand that. This one printed the scoreboard in its headline.