The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) established a new office in order to identify people who lied on their citizenship applications and to denaturalize them. USCIS is hiring several dozen immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who are suspected of using fake identities to get a green card and later on citizenship through naturalization. Such cases might be referred to the Department of Justice to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. Another possibility are criminal charges related to fraud. USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna said the Task Force will implicate a few thousand people.

Denaturalization is the legal procedure for revoking and nullifying citizenship. For decades it was quite common practice in the United States until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that all American citizens, whether native-born or naturalized, could not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. Since then, a naturalized citizen of the United States can be denaturalized only on the grounds that they falsify or conceal relevant facts, refuse to testify before Congress, are a proven member of subversive organization (such as the Nazi Party or Al Qaeda), or because of a dishonorable discharge. As such, denaturalization has been an extraordinary procedure reserved for very serious cases.

It is the first time in decades that the government is willing to programmatically pursue denaturalization and takes away the assumption of permanence of more than twenty million naturalized citizens in the United States. It remains to be seen what extent the government will be able to substantially expand what counts as naturalization fraud, and how the courts will handle the issue.