The Trump administration has reportedly set a goal of yanking citizenship away from over a thousand naturalized Americans in fiscal year 2026, in yet another escalation in the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
New guidance issued on Tuesday directs the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices to “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” next year, according to The New York Times.
Denaturalization is extremely rare. Per the Times, Justice Department figures say that only about 120 denaturalization cases had been filed since 2017, in sharp contrast to the potentially thousands of cases the administration is seeking to file in just one year.
According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, only 11 denaturalization cases were opened per year on average between 1990 and 2017; there was an uptick during the first Trump administration of about 25 cases a year, but nowhere near their current stated goal.
Experts have noted that the Trump administration’s guidance will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to carry out through typical legal pathways. Only federal courts can strip away citizenship, and the threshold for denaturalization is high, happening primarily in cases where the government alleges citizenship was obtained 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,” former USCIS policy chief Amanda Baran told The New York Times. “Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, USCIS should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated.”
One former Department of Homeland Security official, Morgan Bailey, told Newsweek that it would be “virtually impossible” for officials to process the number of cases that the new guidance demands. “USCIS could send more cases to the Justice Department by lowering the threshold, but the DOJ’s burden and the standard required by the DOJ to bring these cases in federal court haven’t changed,” Bailey said.
The Trump administration has been charging forth with many immigration enforcement actions that experts have said are illegal, seeking to target nearly every pathway of immigration. The Justice Department said in a memo this summer that the administration will “maximally pursue” denaturalization efforts, targeting people the administration “determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
Experts say the new guidance will strike fear into Americans, particularly those in communities that have been targeted in the Trump administration’s racist crackdown.
“Setting a quota for denaturalization is vicious and cruel, and designed to send a message of fear,” said American Immigration Council fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on social media. “But each case must be proved in front of a federal judge, and the DOJ is already stretched paper thin, so like [Stephen] Miller’s effort to do this in Trump 1.0 it may be more bark than bite.”
“Requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans,” former USCIS official Sarah Pierce told the Times.
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