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The Department of Justice has ramped up its use of a rarely deployed legal tool to strip citizenship, targeting 12 naturalized Americans accused of hiding ties to terrorism, violent crimes, and other offenses and signaling more cases will follow.
The action on Friday against 12 immigrants included bringing civil complaints or charges against those from Iraq, Somalia, China and India. It comes as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche touts expanding the typically difficult effort to denaturalize people and also follows the DOJ Civil Division ordering more denaturalizations in a memo last summer about the Trump administration's priorities, which include cracking down on illegal immigration and fraud.
Blanche said in a statement to Fox News Digital of Friday's sweeping enforcement action that anyone "who intentionally concealed their criminal histories or misrepresented themselves during the naturalization process will face the fullest extent of the law."
One of the dozen, Ali Yousif Ahmed, gained citizenship after saying he fled Iraq in 2009 because al-Qaeda terrorists attacked his family, authorities said. But, authorities said, Iraq sought Ahmed's extradition in 2019 for allegedly murdering two Iraqi police officers while a leader in al-Qaeda, a detail he allegedly omitted from the U.S. government.
Another, Salah Osman Ahmed of Somalia, naturalized in 2007 and pleaded guilty in 2009 to providing material support for terrorists and belonged to the terrorist group al-Shabaab, Fox News Digital learned. The DOJ alleged that joining a terrorist group within five years of naturalization was grounds for revoking citizenship.
Others included Abduvosit Razikov of Uzbekistan, who allegedly entered into a sham marriage to gain citizenship, and Oscar Alberto Pelaez of Colombia, a priest who was convicted in the United States of 13 counts of sexual abuse of a minor, including sodomy, and allegedly lied about the crimes during the naturalization process, Fox News Digital learned.
Denaturalization has long been an infrequent tool for immigration enforcement. In the span of about 30 years, the DOJ filed about 305 denaturalization cases. Then, when Trump first took office in 2017, the government brought 168 cases. The figure drastically reduced under President Joe Biden, and now with Trump back in office, the effort has returned to the fore.
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Prosecutors must meet a high bar to denaturalize immigrants by proving with "clear and convincing" evidence that "material fraud" occurred during the naturalization process, Neama Rahmani, a California-based former federal prosecutor, told Fox News Digital, saying it was not an easy process.
Blanche warned during a recent CBS News interview that people "should be worried" if they obtained citizenship through fraud.
"Who are targets are? We are not limiting ourselves to anyone in particular except to say that unfortunately, and I think you're going to hear more about this in the coming days and weeks, there are a lot of U.S. citizens who shouldn't be," Blanche said.
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Pressed on denaturalization being a "very drastic penalty," Blanche shot back, "It's a very drastic reward being naturalized, committing fraud."
Immigrants rights groups have raised worries that the some 24 million naturalized citizens in the United States have been left unsettled by the Trump administration's broadened pursuit of revoking citizenship.
"There are concerns that the federal government’s denaturalization efforts could lead to the revocation of U.S. citizenship of many individuals who made minor or unintentional mistakes or omissions in their naturalization application," Forum policy expert Christian Penichet-Paul wrote last summer.
Rahmani noted that the alleged fraud cannot be trivial or negligent, but instead must be significant and intentional.
"It has to be something material, and material means that the citizenship would not have been granted had DHS known," Rahmani said. "That's really the standard."
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