Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is leading what the Justice Department calls the largest denaturalization campaign in its history, targeting naturalized citizens who allegedly concealed violent crimes and sexual offenses when they applied for citizenship. The effort has already dwarfed anything attempted by prior administrations, and Blanche says it is "only the beginning."
The DOJ has identified 384 naturalized citizens in an initial wave of cases, Breitbart reported. The alleged offenses range from attempted first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon to aggravated sexual assault of a child. Each target is accused of obtaining U.S. citizenship through fraud or by hiding serious criminal conduct during the naturalization process.
The numbers tell a stark story. Between 1990 and 2017, the federal government filed just 305 total denaturalization cases. The entire Biden administration produced fewer referrals in four years than Blanche's DOJ has generated in a single year. The current administration has filed 123 civil denaturalization complaints since January 20, 2025, Just The News reported, with 25 of those complaints landing in a single two-week stretch.
That two-week burst alone constitutes what the DOJ described as the largest denaturalization surge in recorded history.
Fox News reported that the 25 individuals named in the latest coordinated filing hail from 17 different countries. Their alleged crimes span attempted murder, child sexual abuse, marriage fraud, and identity fraud. Total filings have reached 88 since Inauguration Day, a figure that continues to climb.
Blanche framed the effort in blunt terms.
"Today's filings represent the largest coordinated denaturalization effort in Department history, but they are only the beginning."
Denaturalization is a civil proceeding in which the government asks a federal court to revoke a person's citizenship. It applies when an individual is found to have obtained naturalization illegally or through willful misrepresentation. Under federal law, U.S. citizens can lose their citizenship for terrorist affiliations, lying about their identity, or deliberate deceit during the naturalization process.
The Trump administration laid early groundwork for this kind of campaign. In February 2020, the Justice Department created a dedicated unit within the Civil Division's Office of Immigration Litigation to investigate and litigate revocation of naturalization, National Review reported. That unit grew out of a discovery roughly a decade ago, when a border official found 200 people who had previously been ordered deported but had obtained citizenship under false identities.
Former USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna described the significance of that institutional shift at the time.
"We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place."
Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt, who oversaw the unit's creation, put it in sharper terms: "When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system, and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to these criminals."
One case illustrates the pattern the DOJ says it is targeting. Hassan Sherjil Khan, a Pakistani-born Long Island doctor, was convicted of sexually exploiting an 11-year-old girl. He groomed the victim starting when she was 11 and traveled to London to have sex with her when she was 15. A court sentenced him to 17 years in prison in 2016.
Khan applied for U.S. citizenship in August 2012, just four months after the London trip, the New York Post reported. He obtained citizenship in 2013 and was arrested in 2015. The government alleges he concealed his criminal conduct during the naturalization process. The DOJ has now filed a denaturalization case against him.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate used the Khan case to send a direct warning.
"If you fail to disclose serious crimes while seeking naturalization, the government will discover your lies and revoke your ill-gotten US citizenship."
The current push is not running through a single office. The DOJ has decentralized the effort across all 93 U.S. attorneys' offices nationwide, the Washington Examiner reported. A newly created National Fraud Enforcement Division supports the work, giving federal prosecutors in every district the tools and mandate to pursue denaturalization referrals locally.
DOJ deputy director for communications Matthew Tragesser described the institutional posture plainly: "The Department of Justice is laser-focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process."
Tragesser also emphasized the pace. "Our filed referrals in one year have exceeded the total during the entire four years of the Biden administration, with many more to come."
Denaturalization carries consequences beyond the loss of a passport. Once citizenship is revoked, an individual can be reclassified as a deportable alien, opening the door to removal proceedings. For those already serving prison sentences, revocation can mean deportation upon release rather than reentry into American communities.
The 384 individuals identified in the initial wave represent the opening salvo, not the full scope. Shumate signaled the DOJ intends to keep accelerating. "Every one of these individuals committed crimes incompatible with U.S. citizenship," he said. "We are moving at record speed to denaturalize those who sought to deceive the federal government and abuse the naturalization process."
Investigators will need to determine, case by case, whether each individual's naturalization involved material misrepresentation or concealment. Each case requires a federal court to make that finding before citizenship can be stripped. The legal burden rests on the government, and defendants retain the right to contest the proceedings.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed how many of the 384 cases involve violent offenses versus fraud-based violations such as identity or marriage fraud. The breakdown between crime categories remains unclear as filings continue to roll out across all 93 districts.
The gap between past enforcement and the current pace raises an uncomfortable question: how many individuals who obtained citizenship through fraud or while concealing serious crimes were simply never pursued? The numbers suggest the answer is substantial. If the government filed only 305 cases across 27 years, and a single administration can identify 384 targets in months, the backlog of uninvestigated cases may be far larger than anyone in Washington previously acknowledged.
The dedicated denaturalization unit created in 2020 gave the DOJ the institutional architecture. Blanche's directive gave it the political will. Whether the courts process these cases at the speed the administration demands will determine how many of the 384 targets actually lose their citizenship.
Citizenship earned through lies is not citizenship at all. The only real question is why it took this long for the government to say so out loud.
