( Spanish) – Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s top immigration advisor and who is expected to be the deputy secretary general of the White House for policy, said more than a year before the November elections that, in a second term of the now president-elect of the United States, they would carry out a “turbocharged” denaturalization project compared to the one that began in the first Trump administration.
While denaturalizations have been historically rare, as of 2018 the trump administration began greater efforts in that regard and, by 2020, a section within the Department of Justice was established specifically dedicated to these cases.
In 2022, Joe Biden’s government published a new denaturalization policy that “legitimizes the denaturalization apparatus built by the Trump administration,” said in a statement the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC).
Denaturation is the loss of US citizenship for foreigners who had obtained it in a naturalization process, according to information of the United States Government.
“It is a process where the Government takes action to strip someone of their citizenship,” Elizabeth Uribe, an immigration attorney at Uribe & Uribe APLC, explained to .
These cases are rare and can only occur in federal courts (the Denaturation Section created in 2020, which belongs to the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, can file these procedures). For example, the Department of Justice filed 228 civil denaturalization cases from 2008 to 2020, according to an official at this US agency. Of those total cases, 41% (or 94) occurred during Trump’s first term.
Uribe says these can occur in several situations, including:
- People who are a threat or who the Government considers, under the pretext of terrorism, should lose their citizenship.
- People who, when they applied for citizenship, may not have met the requirements for both residency and citizenship.
- People who committed fraud in the naturalization process.
In line with what the immigration lawyer explained, the Department of Justice indicates that a person may face denaturalization when dealing with “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders and other scammers who obtained naturalization illegally.”
As an example, two recent cases: Gaetan Joseph Helard Lecompte (born in Canada) and Robert Davis (born in Malaysia), who lost their US citizenship – in 2023 and this year, respectively – because they concealed crimes against minors in their naturalization processes. Also in 2023 there was the case of Cruz Miguel Aguina (whose nationality is not specified), who also lost citizenship due to a similar case.
–With reporting from ‘s Krecyte Villarreal, Priscilla Alvarez and Alayna Treene.
Add Comment