March 29, 2024

Trump Creates ‘Denaturalization’ Task Force to Revoke Citizenship and Deport People


Photo by Mark Wilson, Getty Images


Our posturing president is wasting colossal amounts of money to appeal to his rabidly anti-immigrant base.


By Angela Helm / 07.05.2018


There’s government pork and then there’s just swine.

Our posturing president, who is wasting colossal amounts of money to appeal to his rabidly anti-immigrant base, would be the latter.

In June, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly announced a new task force that will investigate “bad” naturalization cases, wherein the agency will hire dozens of lawyers and immigration officers “to find U.S. citizens they say should not have been naturalized, to revoke their citizenship, and then eventually deport them,” according to The Takeaway, from WNYC and Public Radio International.

CNN reports that that the new office in Southern California will review cases and then refer them to the Justice Department, which will then pursue denaturalization proceedings against U.S. citizens accused of fraud.

In an interview with the Associated Press, USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna said the number of cases could reach into the thousands—this in a nation of about 325 million.

“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

CNN reports:

Since the Obama administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also been working to put more than 300,000 fingerprint records into a system that can be checked against citizenship applications.

According to USCIS, the effort to followup on those records has resulted in 2,500 cases that have been flagged for in-depth review, and 95 of those have been referred to the Justice Department to date.

A former chief counsel for USCIS, Ur Jaddou, now a director at the pro-immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, said it was “troubling” that the Trump administration was looking at what has been an ongoing issue.

“Under this administration, this denaturalization effort, doesn’t feel like a good government ensuring integrity,” Jaddou said. “That was already happening before this administration. …So, it begs the question, why the sudden new and, especially public, focus?”

I think we all know—harassment, fear and playing to the piggiest of people.


Originally published by The Root under a Creative Commons license from Gawker Media.