Spotlight On Denaturalization

Much of today's immigration news coverage understandably focuses on mechanisms to gain access to U.S. immigration benefits such as visa status, humanitarian relief or permanent residency. However, recent developments highlight that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will be channeling resources to strip some individuals of the ultimate U.S. immigration benefit - citizenship. While efforts to denaturalize individuals have been a rare occurrence in years past (averaging 46 cases per year from 2004 to 2016 according to The New York Times reports), there has been a notable shift as of late. Most government attempts to strip individuals of U.S. citizenship previously focused on suspected war criminals who lied on their applications, but the scope of focus has clearly expanded in recent years.

The U.S. government made notable efforts to review potentially fraudulent naturalization cases over a decade ago when U.S. Customs and Border Protection found that approximately 200 people had used different identities to secure green cards and citizenship after being issued deportation orders. In September 2016, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report noting that USCIS had granted citizenship to at least 858 individuals ordered deported or removed under another identity when, during the naturalization process, their digital fingerprint records were not available. OIG recommended that ICE finish uploading into the digital repository the fingerprints it identified and that the Department of Homeland Security resolve these cases of naturalized citizens who may have been ineligible. In each of the two years following that report, almost twice as many denaturalization cases were filed by U.S. attorneys.

Further, in 2018, USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna announced that the agency would be launching an office based in Los Angeles to focus on identifying immigrants suspected of cheating on their green card or citizenship applications. The new office aims to hire dozens of attorneys and immigration officers to review these cases and denaturalize ineligible individuals. In an interview with the Associated Press, Cissna noted that while these USCIS investigations will review cases involving name discrepancies, the focus is not on minor discrepancies, but to target those that deliberately changed their identities to deceive officials.

The support of the President in these efforts was evident in the...

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