Stripping U.S. citizenship en masse is harder than Trump vowed

The Trump administration has vowed to step up revocations of citizenship from some naturalized Americans as part of a broader effort to double down on immigration enforcement.

The messaging has sparked fear among immigrant advocates, legal scholars and naturalized citizens who worry about the potential for abuse and the precedent it sets that naturalized immigrants are in a separate class from U.S.-born Americans.

But the cases filed so far are narrower than this rhetoric suggests, highlighting the legal and practical constraints on using this tool more broadly.

NPR reviewed 34 publicly announced denaturalization cases filed or resolved by the DOJ as of May 19, including 11 revocations of citizenship.

"I'm not seeing a major surge of worrisome denaturalizations. To me, it's not at the level of an emergency," said Daniel Kanstroom, professor of law at Boston College who specializes in immigration.

In the last 16 months, the Trump Justice Department says it surpassed the number of cases filed during all four years of the Biden administration — 64, according to available data. The administration is pitching a supercharged denaturalization effort as yet another way to address border security.

"The Department of Justice is laser-focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process," a DOJ spokesman said in a statement. "We are moving at warp speed to ensure fraudsters are held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent."

In a speech at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix in May, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche echoed the sentiment, saying the department was "trying to protect the integrity of the naturalization process."