Citizenship, Revocable

Citizenship is supposed to be the one status the state cannot casually revisit. It is the difference between a right and a privilege, between belonging and permission. On Monday 5 October the Justice Department announced that it had filed civil actions to revoke the citizenship of forty naturalized Americans, which it described as the largest volume of complaints submitted in a single period under the Trump administration. The complaints were filed between 21 August and 2 October in nineteen federal district courts, from the Southern District of Florida to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in the department’s announcement.

The forty are accused of serious offenses. The department listed acting as an agent of a foreign government, voluntary manslaughter and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man; the individual cases it described include sexual abuse of a minor, child pornography, money laundering and identity fraud. Two involve China. Jinchao Wei, a former U.S. Navy sailor, was convicted in August 2025 of espionage and related charges, and the department says he began conspiring to sell military information before he naturalized in May 2022. Ping Li pleaded guilty in 2024 to acting as an agent of the People’s Republic of China without notifying the Attorney General, after working at the direction of China’s Ministry of State Security from at least 2012. Of the thirty-five defendants the release describes by name, nine were born in Mexico, and the youngest is 26 and the oldest 76. In most of the cases the allegation is not the crime alone but the claim that the conduct predated naturalization and was concealed during the process.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a court may revoke citizenship and cancel the certificate of naturalization if the naturalization was illegally procured or was procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation. That distinction matters enormously, and the department’s announcement observes it. The government is not claiming it can strip citizenship from any naturalized American who later commits a crime. It is claiming these forty were never lawfully entitled to citizenship in the first place. “Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship,” said Brett A. Shumate, the assistant attorney general who heads the department’s Civil Division.

A tool with a history

Denaturalization is an old power, rarely used. Between 1990 and 2017 the Justice Department filed a total of 305 denaturalization cases, an average of eleven a year, according to a fact sheet from the National Immigration Forum, which also cites the Hofstra law professor Irina Manta’s count of 168 cases during President Trump’s first term and 64 during President Biden’s. Historically the power was reserved for egregious cases, the most notable involving Nazi war criminals who concealed their pasts. Because the cases are costly and labor-intensive, the department has pursued them only sporadically, the Guardian reported, citing a New York Times count of about 120 people denaturalized between 2017 and late 2025. The rarity was the point. Citizenship was treated as nearly irrevocable precisely because making it revocable changes what it is.

The current administration is changing the scale. In 2025 the department issued a memo instructing its Civil Division to ramp up denaturalization efforts, including by adopting more categories of people who qualify, and in April the Times reported that the department had identified at least 384 naturalized citizens whose citizenship it wanted to revoke, according to the Guardian. The forty new filings extend the pattern, and the department has signaled plainly that more are coming. “This administration will continue to pursue the largest denaturalization effort in department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship,” Shumate said.

There is a reasonable case for the tool itself. Citizenship obtained by fraud is not citizenship honestly earned, and few would argue that a sailor who concealed an espionage scheme to naturalize should keep the passport. The offenses alleged in this batch are grave. The legal standard requires the government to prove its case in federal court, and, as the department’s own release notes, the complaints are allegations only; there has been no determination of liability.

The signal beyond the cases

But the scale is the story, and the scale sends a signal that travels far beyond nineteen courthouses. When the government files denaturalization cases at a pace it calls without precedent, every naturalized citizen does the same quiet arithmetic. The law draws a line between fraud at naturalization and crimes committed after it, but the public announcement does not linger on that distinction. What travels is the headline: the government is reviewing who belongs.

This is how a rarely used power becomes a routinely feared one without any statute changing. The chilling effect does not require the government to win all forty cases, or any of them. It requires only that millions of naturalized Americans understand that their status is, in principle, auditable. Citizenship that can be audited is citizenship with conditions, and conditional citizenship is a different kind of membership.

The administration would answer that the conditions were always there, written into the Immigration and Nationality Act, and that enforcing them is not the same as inventing them. That is legally true and politically beside the point. Powers exist on a spectrum between dormant and active, and moving a power along that spectrum changes the relationship between the state and the citizen even when every individual case is justified on its merits.

What is being tested

The deeper question is what the denaturalization campaign is actually testing. One possibility is the courts: how far judges will let the government stretch the definitions of illegal procurement and material concealment, and whether the pace of filings survives appellate scrutiny. Another is the public: whether Americans will accept the active auditing of naturalized citizenship as a normal function of government.

There is a third possibility, and it is the one worth watching. Citizenship has always been the bright line in American law between those the state can expel and those it cannot. Denaturalization moves people across that line. Used rarely, against war criminals and fraudsters, it affirms the line’s meaning. Used routinely, as an instrument of immigration policy, it blurs the line itself. The forty cases will be litigated one by one, on their facts, in nineteen district courts. The meaning of citizenship is being litigated everywhere at once.

Sources

The number of cases, the filing dates, the nineteen district courts, the offenses alleged, the details of the Wei and Li cases, the names, countries and ages of the defendants and the statements by Todd Blanche and Brett Shumate are from the Justice Department’s press release of 5 October, which was read directly; the release describes thirty-five of the forty defendants individually, and the complaints themselves were not read. The figures of 305 cases between 1990 and 2017 and Irina Manta’s counts are as the National Immigration Forum gives them. The 2025 memo, the 384 citizens identified and the roughly 120 people denaturalized between 2017 and late 2025 are as the Guardian reported them, citing the New York Times; the memo and the Times reporting were not read directly.