The Justice Department has launched what CBS News and other outlets describe as the largest denaturalization campaign in modern U.S. history, moving to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans it accuses of having obtained it through fraud or misrepresentation.
The scale is the story. DOJ figures show nearly 90 denaturalization cases filed since the start of 2026, with officials aiming to bring at least 250 before October. For comparison, the Biden administration filed about 24 such cases over four years, and the first Trump administration brought just over 100 across its entire first term. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said on July 20 that the government has “only scratched the surface” and that “many more complaints are coming.”
Denaturalization is a real but historically rare power: federal law lets the government revoke naturalized citizenship where it can prove fraud or intentional misrepresentation in the naturalization process. Turning a rarely used tool into a mass program creates a class of Americans whose citizenship is provisional, subject to revisiting by prosecutors, in a way that citizenship by birth is not.
The administration has framed the push around “criminals,” including cases involving child molesters and scammers. Civil-liberties advocates warn that a campaign built for volume, seeking to multiply cases several-fold before a deadline, invites error and can be aimed at naturalized citizens the administration finds inconvenient, including critics and immigrants of particular national origins. The through-line with the rest of this record is the treatment of citizenship itself as revocable.
Update (October 6, 2026): On October 5 the Justice Department announced complaints seeking to strip citizenship from 40 people, filed between August 21 and October 2, which it called the largest single-period filing under the Trump administration. Attorney General Todd Blanche went further: “Today's announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history.” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said, “Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship.” The department said the alleged offenses include acting as an agent for a foreign government, voluntary manslaughter and aggravated sodomy; one defendant is Jinchao Wei, a former Navy sailor convicted of espionage, the Guardian reported. Nine of the 40 are from Mexico, four from Pakistan and two from China, Time reported, and the department had filed against 25 people in August. No outlet gave a 2026 running total to measure against the stated goal of 250 cases by October.