Filing follows 2025 DOJ memo broadening denaturalization categories
The US Department of Justice on Monday announced denaturalization actions against 40 naturalized citizens — what Attorney General Todd Blanche described as the largest such initiative over a single period during the Trump administration.
The denaturalization requests were filed in multiple federal courts between 21 August and 2 October, according to the Justice Department. They target individuals accused of offenses including acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.
Denaturalization is the legal process by which naturalized US citizenship is revoked. Under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, a federal court can revoke naturalization if the government proves citizenship was illegally obtained — through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation. The mechanism is most often deployed against individuals who lied to authorities during naturalization or obtained citizenship through fraudulent marriages, though it can also reach people whose later conduct is alleged to have been concealed from the government.
In a written statement, Blanche said those named in Monday’s announcement “concealed critical facts from the US government and represent serious criminal offenders.” He added that “under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice will continue to employ the denaturalization process to maintain our national security and protect the American people.”
The Monday action comes after the New York Times reported in April that the Justice Department had identified at least 384 foreign-born US citizens whose naturalization it wanted to revoke. A Justice Department official told the Times that effort marked only “the first wave” of citizenship-stripping cases. Trump in previous months had reportedly pushed the Justice Department to pursue denaturalization cases en masse.
In 2025, the first year of Trump’s second presidency, the Justice Department’s civil division was instructed by memo to ramp up denaturalization efforts — including by adopting broader categories of individuals qualifying for revocation — a move experts have said has supported the president’s mass deportation agenda.
Because denaturalization cases are costly and require extensive manpower, the Justice Department has historically pursued them only sporadically. From 2017 to late 2025, the United States denaturalized about 120 people, according to the Times. Monday’s 40 cases approach that multi-year total in a single set of filings.
One of the named cases is Jinchao Wei, a Chinese-born former US Navy sailor. Wei was convicted in August 2025 of charges including espionage and unlawfully exporting technical data related to defense articles. Prosecutors said Wei began plotting to sell military secrets to China months before becoming a US citizen in May 2022, and concealed that conduct during the naturalization process. He was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison.
The 40 people subject to the proceedings announced Monday came from various countries, including Mexico, China, Iran, Pakistan, and the Philippines.