Donald Trump’s administration is moving immigration lawyers to the Department of Justice to expedite denaturalization cases against U.S. citizens.
Last year, the Justice Department announced the president’s plan to “prioritize and maximally pursue” cases against American citizens, marking a radical expansion of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans — people who were not born in America but become citizens — accelerated earlier this year, with instructions that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recommend “100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in 2026.
USCIS is now temporarily transferring a group of agency lawyers to the Justice Department to speed up those cases, USCIS officials told The Independent. Axios first reported the effort.
“We are proud to support this critical effort by providing the Department of Justice with a team of our most skilled immigration law attorneys whose specialized expertise will help ensure individuals who illegally obtained citizenship are stripped of it,” USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler told The Independent.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told The Independent that the agency is welcoming “Special U.S. Attorneys from all federal departments and agencies and state and local partners that are willing to work with us to advance the President’s mission to promote public safety and root out fraud — whether it’s program fraud or immigration fraud.”
Trump and his allies have repeatedly used citizenship and immigration law as a cudgel in the president’s government-wide deportation project, with administration officials and Republican members of Congress routinely threatening to strip citizenship from their political opponents.
The administration has pushed for investigations into citizenship under an ostensible campaign against fraud in the immigration system, though the efforts have vastly expanded the president’s threats to legal immigration while insisting that federal resources are being used to go after the “worst of the worst” criminals.
According to the June 2025 memo, the administration intends to take action against citizens who it believes “pose a potential danger to national security,” or who officials claim have acquired their citizenship through “material misrepresentations.”
The Justice Department also noted that lawyers may pursue denaturalization in “any other cases” that officials believe are “sufficiently important to pursue.”
Roughly 25 million people in the United States are naturalized citizens.
Denaturalization is historically rare. Fewer than 200 cases were filed within the past eight years, and the government brought roughly 11 cases a year between 1990 and 2017, when the first Trump administration began ramping up denaturalization efforts.
The first Trump administration opened a “Denaturalization Section” within the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation to specifically investigate and prosecute a “growing number of referrals anticipated from law enforcement agencies.”
“Aliens who conceal criminal histories, lie under oath, or commit fraud during the naturalization process betray the trust of the American people,” Kahler said in a statement to The Independent.
“This denaturalization effort is absolutely a priority for this administration,” he added. “The question should not be why we are prioritizing it; the question should be why the previous administration deprioritized it.”
Immigration attorneys and advocacy groups warn the Trump administration’s latest guidelines — fueled by a politically motivated agenda — could end up targeting a broad spectrum of American citizens.
The president is also embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle to unilaterally redefine who is eligible for citizenship.
Shortly after taking office, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to amend the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to exclude citizenship from newborn children born to certain immigrant parents.
After losing legal challenges in courts across the country, Trump took his case to the Supreme Court, where the order was met by a largely skeptical panel of justices — including those appointed by the president. A decision in that case is expected by July.
USCIS, meanwhile, has emerged as a key law enforcement tool in the president’s anti-immigration agenda.
The historically administrative agency under Trump-appointed director Joseph Edlow has implemented several restrictive measures since taking over the agency last year, including new guidance that forces immigrants who are temporarily in the U.S. to return to their home countries while seeking a green card.
That policy, announced Friday, states that “aliens seeking adjustment of status” must do so “outside of the country.”
