'Straight-Up Nazi Stuff': Trump Admin Plans to Strip More Naturalized Americans of Citizenship

Policy experts were skeptical Wednesday that the Trump administration could legally or practically carry out its threat to strip more naturalized Americans of their citizenship. Still, they warned that new guidance issued by the White House to immigration officials would ramp up "fear and terror" in immigrant communities and could portend the targeting of naturalized citizens who President Donald Trump views as adversaries.

The guidance was issued Tuesday to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices, with officers directed to supply the Department of Justice (DOJ) with "100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year.

The denaturalization process is "deliberately hard" for the federal government, noted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and stripping people of the citizenship is a rare step only taken in cases of fraud when they applied to be a citizen or in other narrow circumstances.

As such, between 2017-25, there have been just over 120 denaturalization cases filed with the Office of Immigration Litigation at the DOJ.

Under the first Trump administration, denaturalization cases peaked at 90 in one year in 2018, and the directive issued Tuesday signaled the White House is aiming for a far bigger escalation as it also continues its mass deportation operation and blocks people from seeking asylum as they are permitted to under international law.

Reichlin-Melnick called the directive for a denaturalization quota "vicious and cruel," and pointed out that the president is asking USCIS and the DOJ to take on an onerous task.

"These cases are hard to file and win, and require a lot of DOJ resources, and the DOJ is stretched thin already. So we’ll see; I have serious doubts about their ability to do this," said Reichlin-Melnick.

USCIS refers cases to the DOJ, which must prove in a federal court that it has "unequivocal evidence" that someone obtained their citizenship illegally or fraudulently.

"The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that citizenship and naturalization are too precious and fundamental to our democracy for the government to take it away on their whim. Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, USCIS should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated,” Amanda Baran, a former senior USCIS official who served during the Biden administration, told the New York Times.

Naturalized Americans account for 26 million people in the US, with 800,000 people sworn in last year. In most cases, a person who loses their citizenship status is classified as a legal permanent resident.

Trump has repeatedly called to denaturalize Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and to deport her over her criticism of his policies, and has made the same threat against New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.

In those threatened cases, wrote Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, earlier this month, "it appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty."

"Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more 'American' is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable," wrote Waldman. "We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out."

Three other Brennan Center experts also recently wrote about the history of denaturalization efforts in the US, including during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s:

Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.

"This is straight-up Nazi stuff and I’m calling on my fellow Jewish Americans who know where this can lead to be in the vanguard against it," said Dylan Willams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, also noting that the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee has endorsed Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for the denaturalization and expulsion of Muslim Americans and immigrants.

Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS official, told the Times that Trump's quota for denaturalization cases "risks politicizing citizenship revocation" as it has been in the past.

“And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years," she said, "turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”