The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Monday that it has filed a record number of cases seeking to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans accused of serious crimes.
In a press release, the department said it has filed denaturalization actions targeting 40 people “accused of serious offenses.”
According to the DOJ, the cases were filed in a number of U.S. district courts. The offenses at issue include acting as an agent for a foreign government and committing voluntary manslaughter.
The department said the actions were filed between late August and early October and “represent the largest volume of complaints submitted in a single period under the Trump administration.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche hailed the effort as historic.
“Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” Blanche said in the release.
“From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the U.S. government and represent serious criminal offenders,” he added.
The batch of filings stands out against the historical record. Stripping citizenship from Americans who were not born in the U.S. is uncommon. It generally happens only in cases where a person committed fraud in an attempt to immigrate to the country, or where a person committed a disqualifying type of crime.
According to prior research, the government brought only 305 denaturalization cases in the nearly three decades between 1990 and 2018.
By comparison, the 40 actions announced Monday were filed in a span of roughly six weeks, from late August to early October.
The announcement is the latest move in the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown. Since returning to office, the second Trump administration has made immigration enforcement a central focus.
That approach, however, has drawn strong backlash from critics over the administration’s tactics.
Within the last year, multiple people have been fatally shot during encounters with federal immigration authorities. There have also been complaints about how those authorities treat the people they detain.
The DOJ’s latest filings, though, zero in on individuals the department says are serious criminal offenders who hid critical facts from the federal government. Blanche pointed to cases ranging from espionage to sex crimes against minors as examples of the kinds of defendants now facing the loss of their citizenship.
The cases were spread across multiple federal district courts, where judges will now weigh the government’s complaints.
For the Justice Department, the message is that concealing crimes or critical facts from the U.S. government during the path to citizenship can carry serious consequences — including losing that citizenship altogether.
With Monday’s announcement, the administration has now set a new mark for the volume of denaturalization complaints filed in a single period, underscoring its push to use the tool far more aggressively than past administrations have.
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