DOJ refers 384 naturalized Americans for denaturalization in record-volume push

The discrete event is the operational rollout — first reported by The New York Times on April 23, 2026 — of a denaturalization campaign at scale: 384 named foreign-born Americans, parceled out to federal prosecutors in 39 U.S. Attorney's offices, to be litigated as civil denaturalization cases under 8 U.S.C. § 1451. A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement attributed to "the leadership of President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche," said the Department was "pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history" and was "moving at warp speed." NBC News reported that Trump's first term had produced 102 such cases over four years; comparison reporting puts the federal government's 1990–2017 baseline at roughly 11 cases per year, and at about 120 total between 2017 and the end of 2025.

The 384-case batch operationalizes a policy stance set out a year earlier in a June 2025 directive from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, head of the DOJ Civil Division, ordering prosecutors to "prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence." The Shumate memo enumerated ten priority categories ranging from war crimes and national-security threats to fraud in the naturalization application — and a final category covering "any other cases the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue," a clause that functions as an open grant of discretion to expand the program. According to NBC News, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within DHS has reassigned staff to identify between 100 and 200 candidate cases per month for referral, an annualized pace of roughly 2,400 — on the order of a 200-fold increase over the historical baseline.

Denaturalization is a civil judicial proceeding: the government must file in federal district court and prove, by clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence, that citizenship was illegally procured or procured by concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation. That procedural floor — a federal bench trial with a heightened evidentiary standard — remains intact and is a meaningful limit on how many of the 384 referrals will ultimately succeed. The abuse documented here is upstream of those individual trials: the conversion of an instrument historically reserved for war criminals and naturalization fraudsters into a high-volume general-purpose status-review tool applied to a defined class — foreign-born naturalized Americans — at a scale and tempo without modern precedent. The campaign sits alongside the administration's broader immigration enforcement expansion (mass ICE deployments, detention infrastructure buildout) and follows earlier 2025–2026 reporting on visa revocations targeting foreign-born student protesters.