WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has filed lawsuits seeking to revoke the U.S. citizenship of 40 naturalized Americans, a batch Attorney General Todd Blanche called “the largest denaturalization effort in modern history.”
The department announced the cases Monday. The petitions were filed in federal courts around the country between Aug. 10 and Oct. 2, according to Time, and accuse the defendants of concealing crimes or other disqualifying facts when they applied for citizenship. The alleged offenses include child sexual abuse, fraud, money laundering, visa fraud and tax evasion, Time and Al Jazeera reported.
“From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the U.S. government and represent serious criminal offenders,” Blanche said in the announcement.
Who is targeted
Nine of the 40 are originally from Mexico, four from Pakistan and two from China, with others from more than a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Canada, Cuba, Haiti, India, Iran, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and Venezuela, according to Time. More than half of the cases involve immigration or identity fraud, and several involve sexual offenses.
The two defendants from China include Jinchao Wei, a former U.S. Navy sailor who was convicted of espionage and sentenced earlier this year to more than 16 years in prison, and Ping Li of Florida, who was sentenced to four years in November 2024 for conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government, Time reported. The department argues that people who committed crimes before taking the oath lacked the “good moral character” required for citizenship, Al Jazeera reported, though many of the convictions came after the defendants were naturalized.
A steady escalation
Monday’s announcement builds on a series of smaller batches. The department moved to revoke the citizenship of 17 people in June, 10 in July and 25 in August, according to Time. An unnamed department official told CNN in June that the administration planned to file at least 250 denaturalization cases by this month.
That pace is far above historical norms. The Migration Policy Institute found an average of 11 denaturalization cases a year from 1990 to 2017, rising to about 25 a year during President Donald Trump’s first term, Time reported. A June 2025 Justice Department memo set priority categories that include national security threats, undisclosed felonies and violent crimes.
The legal bar
Since the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Afroyim v. Rusk, citizenship has been largely irrevocable unless a person gives it up voluntarily. Naturalized citizens, roughly 25.8 million people, can still lose it involuntarily if they lied during the process or obtained it illegally, and the Supreme Court in 2017 set a high bar of proof for doing so. Prosecutors must show a person willfully concealed a “material fact” that would have disqualified them, Al Jazeera noted.
Critics raise concerns
Human rights groups have warned that expanded denaturalization could leave some people stateless, and critics say the administration has floated the tool against perceived political opponents, Al Jazeera reported. Time reported that Trump has at times leveled the threat at figures including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Elon Musk.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse said in an August report that the true number of cases may be higher than publicized because there is no reliable way to identify every court action, Time reported. Each case must still be decided by a federal judge.
Photo: U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). File photo of a USCIS naturalization ceremony at Mount Vernon, Virginia, July 4, 2015; not related to the cases in this story.
Sources: Time; Al Jazeera.
This article was produced with AI assistance and is based on reporting from Time and Al Jazeera.