The Trump administration is opening new office space in southern California dedicated to the denaturalization of immigrants who received their U.S. citizenship reports CNN.
Efforts toward denaturalization have been underway under this administration since January 2017, but the new office space, which opened in June, would allow for the advancement of the efforts. The space will open by next year according to nola.com. The Justice Department will seek those who have been rejected citizenship by the U.S. but reapplied with a new identity to enter.
"Nobody who obtained US citizenship by deliberately assuming a false identity will be surprised to learn they are being referred to the Justice Department for removal proceedings," U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesman Michael Bars told CNN. "USCIS screens for deliberate acts of fraud relating to the use of false identities.”
Fears of identity fraud stem from a Homeland Security Inspector General report which found that 858 immigrants who were granted citizenship had been deported under a different name. The U.S. Justice Department finds blame with the practice of not fingerprinting all immigrants and locking them into an indemnification system.
During the Obama administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement worked to plug over 300,000 fingerprints into the system for later use when reviewing the application of citizens. CNN reports that 2,500 cases have been highlighted for review, some of which have been directed to the Justice Department for further inspection.
"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,” USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna said. "What we're looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
Ur Jaddou, former chief counsel for the USCIS, is not nearly as optimistic about the possibilities. The Trump administration approached the citizenship issue with a ‘troubling’ amount of excitement, she says, which could indicate an ulterior motive.
