Donald Trump’s administration is preparing a large-scale campaign to strip people of U.S. citizenship, CBS News reports.
The White House is expected to announce as soon as today that it intends to seek the denaturalization of 17 naturalized Americans accused of immigration fraud.
The Justice Department said the initiative would be the largest effort to use denaturalization powers. By comparison, from 1990 to 2017, the department filed an average of only 11 such lawsuits a year.
Federal law allows citizenship to be revoked for people who obtained it through naturalization if the authorities prove that it was secured by fraud. That can include concealing criminal activity or other material information.
According to CBS News, some of the 17 individuals have already been convicted of serious crimes, including sexual offenses against children. Others have been convicted of fraud or are accused of violating immigration law.
Among them are an immigrant from Haiti accused of sexually abusing his own daughter; a native of the former Yugoslavia convicted of sexually abusing a child; a Mexican-born man convicted of receiving explicit images of minors; a former Catholic priest from Colombia accused of child sexual abuse; and a Philippines-born man who pleaded guilty in a case involving a sexual offense against a child.
The list also includes an Indian-born man accused of H-1B visa fraud; the daughter of a Colombian drug trafficker accused of money laundering; a Jamaica-born man convicted of wire fraud; and a Cuba-born woman accused of defrauding a casino owned by a Native American tribe.
If courts grant the denaturalization lawsuits, these people will revert to their previous immigration status—typically that of a U.S. permanent resident. Along with citizenship, they will lose the rights and protections it confers, including protection from deportation.