The United States government has formalised efforts to revoke U.S. citizenship from certain naturalised citizens through a newly surfaced Justice Department memo that directs federal attorneys to prioritise denaturalisation for individuals who committed specific crimes or misrepresented information during their naturalisation process.
According to a report by The Guardian on Monday, the memo dated June 11, calls for civil proceedings against individuals who either “illegally procured” naturalisation or did so through “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”
Unlike criminal trials, those facing civil denaturalisation are not entitled to legal representation, and the government faces a lower burden of proof.
At the center of the move according to the report are the estimated 25 million US citizens who immigrated to the country after being born abroad, according to data from 2023, and it lists 10 different priority categories for denaturalisation.
According to the memo, those subjected to civil proceedings are not entitled to an attorney as they are in criminal cases.
And the government has a lighter burden of proof in civil cases than they do in criminal ones.
The memo claims such efforts will focus on those who are involved “in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses … [and] naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the US”.
The justice department’s civil rights division has been placed at the forefront of Trump’s policy objectives, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes within the government as well as ending transgender treatments, among other initiatives.
That comes as the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency registered its 13th in-custody death for the fiscal year beginning in October 2024. There had been 12 such deaths during the entire fiscal year that finished at the end of September 2024.
On Friday Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia, resigned amid an investigation by the justice department’s civil rights division.
The investigation took aim at the university’s DEI programs and it continues to consider race and ethnicity in various programmes and scholarships.
The justice department also took the unusual step in recent days of suing 15 US district attorneys in Maryland over an order blocking the immediate deportation of migrants challenging their removal.
The justice department’s civil rights division is reportedly in disarray as its traditional mission to combat racial discrimination after the civil rights movement is reshaped by priorities stemming from the president’s executive orders.
About 250 attorneys or 70% of the division’s lawyers were believed to have left the department in the time between January and the end of May, according to a recent National Public Radio report.
The memo’s focus on denaturalisation comes as at least one person has been denaturalised in recent weeks.
On 13 June, a judge ordered the revocation of the citizenship of Elliott Duke. Duke is a US military veteran originally from the UK who was convicted of distributing child sexual abuse material and had not disclosed the crime during the naturalisation process.
Immigration attorneys are concerned that denaturalisation cases via civil litigation strip some rights from the individual, including rights to an attorney as well as lowering the threshold of proof, and speeding up the denaturalisation process.
“It is kind of, in a way, trying to create a second class of US citizens,” said Sameera Hafiz, policy director of the Immigration Legal Resource Center, to NPR.
