The DOJ Has a List of 385 Americans It Wants to Strip of Citizenship — and Nobody Can Agree Whether That’s Justice or a Purge

The Trump administration plans to file at least 250 denaturalization cases in federal courts by October 2026, according to a CNN exclusive published June 18 citing a senior Justice Department official. The Justice Department has compiled a target list of 385 naturalized citizens it alleges obtained their U.S. citizenship fraudulently, and has already filed 29 such cases in less than two months of the current fiscal year [1]. By comparison, the DOJ filed a total of only 166 denaturalization complaints between 2008 and June 12, 2026 — across 18 years — averaging fewer than 10 cases per year [1, 2].

Federal law has long authorized denaturalization when a naturalized citizen can be proven to have secured citizenship through fraud, such as by concealing criminal conduct on an immigration application. Every case must be litigated in federal court before a judge who requires proof meeting a high evidentiary burden [2]. Former DOJ veteran Stacey Young, who spent 18 years at the department, told CNN that while the administration can accelerate case filing, “the litigation process itself is still going to be a huge impediment to their goal of denaturalizing people in huge numbers.” An NPR investigation published earlier in June found the administration’s denaturalization campaign has moved more slowly than its public rhetoric suggested, given the legal complexity of each case [3].

Why It Sucks:

Immigration Restrictionists and Trump Supporters

• This enforces existing law, not new policy. Denaturalization authority has been on the books for decades; the current DOJ is applying a long-available legal tool that prior administrations declined to use, and that restraint left documented fraud in the naturalization system unaddressed [1, 2].
• 385 targeted cases is a precise, limited list. With more than a million naturalizations approved each year, a target list of 385 specific cases — representing a fraction of a fraction of all naturalized citizens — is not a mass revocation program but a focused enforcement action against documented alleged misconduct [1].
• Fraudulent citizenship must carry real consequences. If obtaining U.S. citizenship through false statements carries no meaningful risk of consequence, it creates an incentive structure that disadvantages the millions of applicants who comply honestly and undermines the integrity of the naturalization system [2, 3].

Naturalized Citizens and Immigrant Rights Advocates

• This breaks 18 years of precedent in one fiscal year. Filing 250 denaturalization cases in a single year — when the entire prior 18-year period produced only 166 — represents a categorical escalation that advocates say is designed to maximize fear and deterrence across immigrant communities, not to correct specific documented fraud [1, 2].
• Long-settled legal Americans now live with statelessness as a threat. Naturalized citizens who have lived in the United States for decades, raised families, paid taxes, and served in the military are consulting immigration attorneys over decades-old paperwork concerns, fearing that minor errors or omissions could be redefined as fraudulent [1, 3].
• The broad fraud standard can become a pretext for targeting. “Concealing” information on an immigration application is broad enough to cover minor, decades-old discrepancies; advocates argue DOJ will use technical paperwork issues to target individuals based on national origin, religion, or political activity rather than genuine criminal fraud [2, 3].

Legal Scholars and Civil Libertarians

• The government will lose most of these cases in court. Every denaturalization requires convincing a federal judge with clear and convincing evidence — a demanding standard that becomes harder to meet when cases are rushed to reach a political quota; former DOJ officials told CNN that bulk filing will produce a high rate of government defeats [1].
• Courts require fraud that was material to the original approval. The Supreme Court has held that denaturalization requires proof that the fraud directly affected the naturalization decision, not merely that a discrepancy existed; that constitutional floor will block many of the DOJ’s targeted cases regardless of filing volume [2, 3].
• The process itself functions as punishment, win or lose. Even naturalized citizens who ultimately prevail must hire attorneys, endure years of litigation, and live under the threat of statelessness during proceedings; the government bears no comparable institutional cost whether it wins or loses, making mass filing a low-cost tool of intimidation regardless of legal merit [1, 3].

Sources & Citations:

[1] CNN: Exclusive: Trump administration ramps up effort to revoke citizenship from naturalized Americans
[2] CBS News: U.S. planning aggressive expansion of denaturalization push, aiming for 250 cases by fall
[3] NPR: Trump vowed to revoke hundreds of citizenships. It’s proving harder to do