The United States Department of Justice said Monday it will seek to strip citizenship from 17 people convicted of crimes, a rare move that puts one of the Trump administration’s sharpest immigration tools back in play. The cases, if they go forward, will be decided in federal court.
The announcement gives Todd Blanche a new line of attack to defend on the same day a federal judge knocked down the administration’s $100,000 fee on H1-B visas. Blanche said gaining US citizenship is a privilege and that, under President Trump’s leadership, the Justice Department maintains a zero-tolerance policy for abusing the naturalization process.
The people targeted were born in places including Cuba, Haiti, Somalia, China, India and elsewhere, and the department said the convictions ranged from healthcare fraud and wire fraud to conspiracy to manipulate stock prices. In each case, prosecutors accused the defendants of hiding criminal activity during the naturalization process, the kind of allegation the government says can justify denaturalization only for people who became citizens through naturalization, not by birth.
Denaturalization is unusual in the United States because it can happen only in federal court and applies to a narrow set of citizens who obtained nationality through the citizenship process. The Trump administration has leaned hard on that authority while also pursuing other limits on immigration and citizenship, including an executive order early in Trump’s presidency that sought to revoke birthright citizenship for Americans born to undocumented parents.
That broader campaign is now moving on two tracks at once. While the Justice Department pushes to remove citizenship from the 17 people it identified, the administration is also facing legal setbacks on the visa side, after Judge Leo Sorokin said the $100,000 H1-B payment was, in substance, a tax that needed congressional approval. Twenty Democratic attorneys general challenged that fee in court.
The overlap matters because it shows the administration is not treating citizenship and visas as separate fights. It is pressing both fronts at once, even as the courts are signaling that some of those moves may not survive. The denaturalization cases will now have to be filed and tested one by one in federal court, and the government has not said which of the 17 people will be targeted first.
