Taking away a person’s U.S. citizenship is rare and, historically, hasn’t been easy to do.
President Donald Trump’s administration nevertheless is pushing to denaturalize foreign-born American citizens accused of certain crimes.
At the same time, his administration is slow-walking renewals and applications that threaten to put the future of two other groups of people at risk: young immigrant “Dreamers” trying to re-up their temporary legal status and immigrants seeking asylum.
The moves raise his already-expansive immigrant deportation program to a new level.
The Justice Department recently announced denaturalization cases in federal courts across the country against about a dozen U.S. citizens born overseas. Officials said they had committed serious crimes or immigration fraud, or had ties to terrorism.
Should the people be found guilty of such accusations, serious punishment would seem appropriate, even possibly losing their citizenship.
While that may not seem like a lot of cases, Trump has leaned into robust denaturalization campaigns before.
During the first Trump administration, there were approximately 170 cases of denaturalization, about 42 per year, according to data from Hofstra University Law analyzed by the National Immigration Forum, while there were 64 cases, about 16 a year, when President Joe Biden was in the White House.
Between 1990 and 2017, the U.S. government filed just over 300 denaturalization cases — or an average of 11 per year, according to CBS News.
Among those targeted by the recently announced denaturalization crackdown are a Colombian-born Catholic priest convicted of sexually assaulting a minor; a man born in Morocco with alleged ties to al-Qaeda; a Somali immigrant who pleaded guilty to providing material support to al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group; and a former Gambian police officer allegedly involved in war crimes.
The group also includes individuals who allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits and a man who allegedly entered into sham marriages to commit immigration fraud.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche this month told CBS he believes there are “a lot of individuals who are citizens who shouldn’t be.” But he added that only “a very small percentage” of the approximately 24 million naturalized citizens should be concerned.
The others don’t “have anything to worry about,” he said.
They might if they have been paying attention to what Trump has been saying and posting. The president earlier espoused a broader view of who should be targeted for denaturalization.
Last year, Trump directed the Department of Justice to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings.” In a Thanksgiving Truth Social post, he said he would “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility” and people who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization,” in addition to those who commit actual crimes.
He acknowledged he didn’t know if he had the power to do that, and the law would seem to be against it.
Past Supreme Courts set a high bar for denaturalizations, according to ABC News. In 1946, the court warned against the use of denaturalization as a “ready instrument for political persecutions.” This came after the United States ramped up denaturalizations during World Wars I and II and during the subsequent second Red Scare era of heightened anti-communism.
Trump has long expressed interest in deporting certain foreigners or depriving them of certain rights and benefits. He’s also trying to overturn birthright citizenship automatically granted to people born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants and people with temporary legal status.
He has repeatedly said his deportation effort is aimed at serious criminals and people who threaten national security, or the “worst of the worst,” according to the administration. Yet the majority of people detained and deported have been neither serious nor violent criminals, according to studies by the Cato Institute and others.
The difference between the stated goal of who should be removed from the country in the deportation campaign and who actually is being targeted should make everyone cautious about taking Blanche’s narrow denaturalization criteria at face value.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has made it easier to deport people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was created in 2012 under President Barak Obama to protect certain people who came to the U.S. as children from deportation and provide them with renewable two-year work authorization.
In 2025, nearly 300 DACA recipients were detained nationwide, and about 90 were deported, according to Ed Source, which said arrests have continued this year amid intensified targeting.
In addition, renewal wait times have increased to levels not seen since 2016 when there were significant technical issues, according to The Associated Press.
Some of the program’s more than 500,000 beneficiaries, often referred to as “Dreamers,” have waited months for renewals, only to see the deadline pass. That means they lose their work authorization and possibly their driver’s license, and their ability to stay in the country is threatened.
Trump has repeatedly expressed support for DACA recipients and the desire to “work something out” for them, even as he has tried to end the program, a matter now pending in court.
The Washington Post further reports that other immigrants are giving up their asylum claims for humanitarian protection and agreeing to depart the United States in exponentially higher numbers under the Trump administration. Many of them have made the decision as they wait in federal detention centers, where they increasingly face prolonged stays.
Immigration judges issued more than 80,000 “voluntary departure” orders from January 2025 through March of this year, according to court data obtained by the Vera Institute of Justice, which seeks legal representation for people seeking asylum.
The number of those people abandoning their cases is at least seven times as high as the number seen in the last 15 months of the Biden administration, when 11,400 took that option, the Post said. More than 70 percent of those granted a voluntary departure order during Trump’s second administration were being held in immigration detention when they made the request, a far higher share than those who departed willingly while Biden was in the White House.
What’s clear is Trump isn’t just relying on law enforcement. In some ways, he’s using the federal bureaucracy — which he used to castigate as the evil “deep state” — to achieve his immigration goals.
What they said
Lawrence Hurley, senior Supreme Court reporter for NBC News.
“The Supreme Court has frequently admonished judges not to interfere in election cases when the process is already underway, but it is now being accused of doing exactly that in recent decisions favoring Republicans in redistricting fights.”