Justice Department Accelerates Denaturalization Proceedings for Foreign-Born Citizens Convicted of Crimes

Erwin Roberto Galindo became a naturalized United States citizen in January 2015. On his naturalization application, he answered “no” when asked whether he had ever committed a crime for which he was not arrested.That was a lie. The same year that he earned his citizenship, a California court convicted him for charges stemming from sexual abuse of an 11-year-old child in 1997 and rape of a 14-year-old in 2009. He was sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison for the two counts of lewd or lascivious acts upon a child.On January 30, the Justice Department filed a civil complaint against Galindo for falsifying his application. He’s now one of the latest batch of 17 naturalized Americans whom the Justice Department said Monday it is seeking to strip of citizenship. The list includes sex offenders, drug traffickers, and identity fraudsters, among others. Officials acknowledge that the recent push to remove citizenship status from more than 400 individuals represents the largest batch of proceedings in American history. In May, the Justice Department named a group of 12 naturalized citizens who had been accused of serious offenses, including with terrorist support, war crimes, sexual assault, and espionage. It was the most high-profile tranche yet, with several cases leaving little room for debate. Jean Claude Alfred, a 68-year-old Haitian national who naturalized in 1994, was convicted in 1996 for sexually abusing his minor daughter beginning in September 1993 — one month before filing his naturalization application. He continued the conduct throughout the naturalization proceedings while swearing under oath he had committed no crimes. Another individual up for denaturalization is an ordained priest. Fernando Cristancho, a 69-year-old Colombian national currently faces a 22-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to grooming and sexually abusing a minor parishioner from the age of 11, using his church position to gain access to the child. Cristancho is the second priest added to the growing list. Officials are explicit: this is only the beginning. Deputy Director for Communications Matthew Tragesser confirmed the scope of action will expand. The department under its acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, is “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history,” he said. The referrals filed since January 2025 well surpass the total filings during the entire Biden administration.Mr. Blanche has gone further, telling CBS that the administration is “not limiting ourselves to anyone in particular,” and warning directly: “If you’re going to come and become a citizen in this country, but you’re going to do it by fraud, you should be worried.”The director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, Francey Hakes, reportedly told colleagues at an internal meeting in April that the cases are only “the first wave.” She depicted the denaturalization push as a “White House initiative,” a characterization the White House disputes. A spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said it “isn’t a White House initiative — it is federal law.”Ms. Hakes acknowledged that many civil divisions in the U.S. Attorney offices are understaffed and already struggling with a surge of lawsuits by immigrants contesting their detentions. The cases are being farmed to civil litigators across 39 regional offices rather than the specialized immigration litigators who have traditionally handled them. The group is being bulked up with civil litigators responsible for healthcare fraud and civil rights enforcement. The Rare Exercise Now Getting a WorkoutDenaturalization is not new. Between 1990 and 2017, the federal government filed 305 cases, averaging roughly 11 annually. The Biden administration between reportedly filed just 24 cases between 2017 and 2021. The governing legal standard for removal comes from Maslenjak v. United States, the 2017 Supreme Court ruling in which all nine justices held that the government must show a false statement was material — meaning it played a role in the granting of citizenship when the truth would have led officials to deny citizenship or investigate further.The cases advertised by the government so far involve some of the most serious crimes imaginable. Yet the monthly quotas — 100 to 200 referrals per month according to Citizenship and Immigration Services guidance issued in December 2025 — were established before the list of targets was assembled. The sequence of cases-first, targets-second has drawn scrutiny from legal observers.The Justice Department has yet to answer how many of the individuals its investigators have identified genuinely qualify for denaturalization. A national security law professor at Roger Williams University, Professor Peter Margulies, told The New York Sun that the government faces difficult obstacles prosecuting each case.“You basically have to show they failed to disclose a material fact — that’s the test in the Maslenjak case — and that is difficult,” Mr. Margulies said. “If there’s a conviction years after someone becomes a citizen, it’s tough to show that the conduct was already occurring at the time when the person adjusted.”He also noted that the sheer volume of cases carries its own risks beyond the courtroom. “Even where the government is correct, there’s a legitimate concern that this creates a chilling effect on immigrants. It sends a message: ‘Be careful. Don’t naturalize. Keep your head down,” Mr. Margulies said. “That would be really unfortunate because people who can naturalize should be encouraged to do so.”Miami-based immigration attorney Anis Saleh, who has practiced for more than three decades, told the Sun the scale of the effort, not the legal mechanism itself, is what makes the pursuit unparalleled.“Historically, it was targeted, and it didn’t go after your run-of-the-mill person unless it was something very serious,” Mr. Saleh said. “Now this appears to be an effort to scare people and sow doubts as to whether or not you’re really a citizen.”Lost in the procedural debate is a set of facts the government’s critics have been slower to acknowledge: a meaningful portion of past denaturalization cases have involved individuals who concealed their sexual abuse of children or other crimes.On June 13, 2025, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered the revocation of citizenship for a U.K. national, Elliott Duke, who enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 2012, while serving in Germany, Mr. Duke began receiving and distributing child sexual abuse material via email and the internet. Investigators later found 168 videos and 187 still images on his computer depicting minor boys and girls engaged in sexual activity and bestiality.When asked on his naturalization application in November 2012 whether he had ever committed a crime for which he was not arrested, Mr. Duke listed only a speeding ticket and repeated that claim under oath before a federal official on January 18, 2013, the day he took the Oath of Allegiance and was granted citizenship.He was arrested in Louisiana in May 2013 and convicted on January 23, 2014, of receipt and possession of child pornography. After the denaturalization order, Mr. Duke, who had revoked his U.K. citizenship upon naturalizing, was left effectively stateless, unable to secure a defense attorney or travel to attend the court hearing.The case was investigated as part of Operation Prison Lookout, an ongoing national initiative involving the Justice Department and ICE to identify and prosecute sex offenders who have fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship. As of the June 2025 denaturalization order, Duke was still serving his 20-year federal sentence and exploring appeal options.A separate case, resolved on September 15, 2025, saw a federal court in Maryland revoke the citizenship of Jorge Antonio Graciano Lara, a Salvadoran national who entered the United States in 1991 and was granted citizenship in 2015.Mr. Graciano Lara had pleaded guilty in 2017 to second-degree rape of his stepdaughter, who was under 14 at the time, repeatedly abusing her between 2012 and 2016 at their home at Rockville in Montgomery County, while the child’s mother was at work. He threatened her into silence by warning that the family would be sent back to El Salvador. He had concealed those crimes during his naturalization process.Gurmeet Singh, an Indian national and New York taxi driver, committed the rape and kidnapping of a sleeping passenger in May 2011, months before naturalizing as a citizen in October of that year. He was convicted in May 2014 of rape in the first degree and kidnapping in the second degree as a sexually motivated felony and sentenced to 20 years in prison.The Justice Department filed to denaturalize Mr. Singh in February 2026, arguing he concealed his active criminal case throughout his naturalization proceedings.The May 8 batch also produced what may be the most striking case in the initiative’s history. Victor Manuel Rocha, a Colombian-born former diplomat who served as director of inter-American affairs at the National Security Council and later as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia under President Clinton, is now facing civil action to strip him of citizenship the government says he obtained through fraud. Mr. Rocha began working for Cuba’s intelligence service as early as 1973, five years before he naturalized in 1978, and continued for decades, pleading guilty in 2024 to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government. He is currently serving a 15-year federal sentence. The Justice Department is pursuing seven separate counts to void his naturalization. U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, whose office filed the complaint in the Southern District of Florida, was unambiguous: “This civil denaturalization case is about finishing the job.”Also among the May 8 cases: Oscar Alberto Pelaez, a 75-year-old Colombian-born Roman Catholic priest who pleaded guilty in 2002 to 13 counts of sexual assault against a child, including acts of sodomy and oral copulation, committed between 1998 and 2000 while serving at a parish in the United States. The Justice Department is now moving to revoke his citizenship on four separate counts, alleging he lacked the good moral character required for naturalization and knowingly lied to immigration authorities about the crimes.The Limits of the LawThe legal path from denaturalization to deportation is neither automatic nor straightforward. Even stripping someone of citizenship does not guarantee they can be removed from the country, a gap the Sixth Circuit’s June 2025 ruling in Gonzalez Castillo v. Bondi exposed in stark terms.The case involved a man who concealed a child abuse indictment to obtain citizenship, pleaded guilty weeks after naturalizing, and was later denaturalized. Yet the court held that he still could not be deported because the conviction had occurred while he was legally a citizen.Judge Amul Thapar, concurring, called the outcome absurd and pointed out that the same man would have been deportable had he possessed marijuana. Judge Thapar said, regardless, he was duty-bound to follow Supreme Court precedent. The criteria that produced the list of targets has not been publicly disclosed. How many concealed crimes against children and how many were swept up in something broader is a question the Justice Department has not answered. The DOJ does provide some clues. Monday’s filing included cases spanning health care fraud, stock manipulation, prescription drug distribution, visa fraud in addition to child sexual abuse.Meanwhile, 2025 proved the most volatile year for naturalization on record — citizenship approvals peaked at 88,488 in a single month early in the year, then fell to 32,862 by January 2026, the lowest monthly figure since tracking began, as tougher scrutiny, a harder civics test, and fear spread through immigrant communities nationwide.By April, a Justice Department official said 15 people had had their citizenship revoked since January 2025, out of 22 total cases filed. For Mr. Saleh, who has spent more than three decades in immigration law and says he has never fielded more consultations on a single issue than he has in the past year, the numbers reflect something the government’s target list cannot capture.“There are bad actors who should be pursued, no question,” he adds. “But you don’t destroy people’s lives unless it’s truly warranted.”

Justice Department Accelerates Denaturalization Proceedings for Foreign-Born Citizens Convicted of Crimes

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