Trump Administration Ramps Up Denaturalization Campaign

LOS ANGELES, CA — The Trump administration is ramping up denaturalization, a complex process once primarily reserved for Nazi war criminals and human rights violators, according to reports Monday.

A Citizenship and Immigration Services team in Los Angeles is reviewing the naturalization files of 2,500 immigrants, looking for signs of fraud or identity theft to revoke their citizenship. Of those cases 100 have been referred to the Department of Justice for action, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"We're receiving cases where (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) believes there is fraud, where our systems have identified that individuals used more than one identity, sometimes more than two or three identities," Dan Renaud, the associate director for field operations at the citizenship agency, told Times. "Those are the cases we're pursuing.”

According to the Times, the administration granted fewer visas and accepted fewer refugees in 2017 than in previous years. According to the Times, the effort stems from an Obama era finding that prior to the use of fingerprint checks in naturalization, some applicants had failed to disclose criminal backgrounds, arrests or deportation orders.

It’s the administration’s latest front in the battle to reduce legal and illegal immigration to the United States.
A coalition of U.S. mayors led by Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti signed a letter criticizing the agency’s priorities amid a failure to handle a massive backlog of naturalization applications.

"The new measure to investigate thousands of cases from almost 30 years ago, under the pretext of the incredibly minimal problem of fraud in citizenship applications, instead of managing resources in a manner that processes the backlogs before them, suggests that the agency is more interested in following an aggressive political agenda rather than its own mission," the letter stated.

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls, said that "denaturalization, like deportation, is an essential tool to use against those who break the rules.

"It's for people who are fraudsters, liars," he said, according to The Times. "We've been lax about this for a long time, and this unit that's been developed is really just a question of taking the law seriously."
However, some fear the process is being abused to target legal immigrants on trumped up accusations
“I think they’ll … find people with very minor transgressions,and they’ll take away their citizenship,” LA Immigration attorney Carl Shusterman told the Times.

Recently, the federal government moved to block victims of gang violence and domestic abuse from claiming asylum. White House senior advisor Stephen Miller is pushing a policy that could make it more difficult for those who have received public benefits, including Obamacare, to become citizens or green card holders, according to multiple news outlets.

The Los Angeles Times goes on to examine the historic use of denaturalization to put the latest effort into context. Click here for the full Los Angeles Times story.

City News Service and Patch staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report. Photo courtesy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.