The U.S. Justice Department announced on Friday, May 8, 2026, that it has filed civil cases in federal courts across nine states and the District of Columbia seeking to strip 12 naturalized Americans of their U.S. citizenship.
The announcement is being framed by the administration as a routine enforcement action against people accused of fraud, war crimes, terrorism support, and sexual abuse. The reality is bigger and more troubling than that framing suggests.
For most of recent American history, denaturalization was a rare and carefully limited tool. Between 1990 and 2017, the federal government filed an average of about 11 cases per year, and those cases were almost always reserved for the most extreme circumstances — Nazi war criminals, for example.
The Biden administration filed an average of 16 per year. The first Trump administration ramped that number up to between 25 and 42 per year. The second Trump administration is now blowing past every prior benchmark, with new internal guidance reportedly calling for as many as 2,400 referrals annually and an initial litigation wave already targeting 384 individuals.
That is a more than twentyfold increase over the historical average — and the people being stripped of citizenship are no longer limited to the worst of the worst.
What the Justice Department Announced
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed Friday’s filings in stark moral terms, saying the administration is correcting “egregious violations” of the immigration system and warning that anyone who concealed criminal histories during naturalization will “face the fullest extent of the law.”
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who oversees the Civil Division, said the department is now filing denaturalization actions “at record speeds.”
The 12 individuals named Friday are originally from Bolivia, China, Colombia, The Gambia, India, Iraq, Morocco, Nigeria, and several other countries. The most prominent name is Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia and native of Colombia, who is currently serving a 15-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to working as a covert spy for the Cuban government.
Others include Khalid Ouazzani, a Moroccan-born man who pleaded guilty in 2010 to providing material support to Al-Qaeda, and Baboucarr Mboob of The Gambia, who reportedly admitted to participating in an extrajudicial execution of fellow military officers — a war crime — during testimony before his home country’s reconciliation commission.
These are the cases the Justice Department wants the public to focus on. They are not the full picture.
The Bigger Picture: A Quota System for Stripping Citizenship
A June 2025 internal memo directed Justice Department civil division employees to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” and laid out 10 priority categories of people to target.
In December, the Department of Homeland Security was directed to refer as many as 200 potential cases per month — roughly the same number the federal government once filed in a generation.
Mariam Masumi Daud, an immigration lawyer in Northern Virginia, told reporters the administration’s approach is “very troubling” precisely because of how broad it has become.
“At this point, the administration isn’t really being selective; they’re being very sweeping,” she said. “That makes it very concerning, especially when you have a quota system. They’re pursuing a number.”
A quota system for stripping people of their citizenship is not how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. It is how political purges work.
Why This Should Worry Every Naturalized American
There are roughly 24 million naturalized citizens in the United States. Blanche told reporters Friday that only “a very small percentage” should be worried, and that those who did not lie on their applications have nothing to fear. That assurance is not as comforting as it sounds.
Civil denaturalization cases are not regular criminal trials. There is no right to a court-appointed attorney, meaning poor defendants often face the federal government with no lawyer at all.
There is no jury — a single judge decides whether a person remains American. The burden of proof is lower than in a criminal case. And critically, there is no statute of limitations, which means the government can comb through paperwork from decades ago looking for any inconsistency, omission, or technicality to use as grounds for revocation.
Two law professors who study citizenship recently argued that this structure likely violates the Constitution. They pointed to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 1958 description of citizenship as “the right to have rights” and warned that taking away such a fundamental right through civil procedures lacking basic constitutional protections raises serious due process concerns.
Civil rights groups have raised an even broader objection. Native-born Americans cannot have their citizenship revoked. Naturalized Americans, under this expanded campaign, can be subject to government review for the rest of their lives. That creates what advocates describe as a two-tier citizenship system — one in which 24 million Americans are functionally on probation forever, while everyone else is not.
The Supreme Court has historically rejected exactly that idea. In Schneider v. Rusk, the Court held that the rights of native-born and naturalized citizens are “of the same dignity and are coextensive,” and warned against any system that treats naturalized citizens as second-class.
A Tool Built for War Criminals, Now Aimed at Ordinary Immigrants
Denaturalization was never meant to be a routine immigration enforcement tool. It was designed for narrow, extraordinary circumstances. The fact that the most attention-grabbing cases announced Friday involve serious crimes is, in a way, the point — they provide political cover for a much larger campaign whose targets will not all be terrorists, spies, or war criminals.
The government’s own priority list includes broad categories like “pending criminal charges” and vague national security concerns, and the push for hundreds of monthly referrals guarantees that decades-old paperwork errors and minor omissions will end up in the pipeline alongside the headline cases.
Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes nationality as a fundamental human right. International human rights law has long treated denaturalization as a serious matter precisely because of how often, historically, governments have used it against ethnic minorities, political dissidents, and disfavored communities.
The pattern is consistent across countries and across centuries, and it never starts with the people the public is told to fear most. It starts with them, and then it expands.
For naturalized Americans watching Friday’s announcement, the message from the administration is that citizenship is no longer a final destination. It is a status the government reserves the right to revisit, indefinitely, on terms it sets and with procedures stacked in its favor.
That is a fundamental change in what American citizenship means — and it is happening with very little public debate.
The 12 names announced Friday are the first wave. The administration has been clear that hundreds more are coming.
