When Donald Trump campaigned on illegal immigration, many people thought it would stop at deporting the illegals. But, wait, there’s more. The most recent step involves cracking down on those in the country “legally” but who may have committed crimes while becoming legal. Denaturalization has been a thing for a while, but it’s getting stricter rules, and more people are finding out the hard way that doing the crime may send them not only to jail, but also out of the US.
Omar Being Investigated
On Friday, March 27, Vice President JD Vance, told conservative commentator Benny Johnson that he thinks Ilhan Omar (D-MN) likely committed immigration fraud. “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” he said. “And I talked to [Trump adviser] Stephen Miller about this recently, we’re trying to look at what the remedies are.”
Omar came to the US as a refugee in 1995. In 2000, at the age of 17, she became a citizen. In 2002, she married her first husband, Ahmed Hirsi, but reportedly never made the marriage legally valid. The couple had three children together. They separated in 2008, and one year later she married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen at the time, who some say is her biological brother. Two years later, they separated but didn’t officially divorce until 2017. Omar and Hirsi reconciled just months after she and Elmi separated.
“I’m worried about the immigration fraud,” Vance said. “I’m also worried about what did Ilhan Omar know about what was happening in the Somali community, and why was nobody looking into it until, frankly, Donald Trump came along?” he added, referring to the massive childcare fraud in Minnesota.
Denaturalization on the Rise
On Thursday, March 26, the Justice Department secured the denaturalization of two criminals “who obtained U.S. citizenship through fraud,” and are in the process of doing the same for a third person who reportedly committed marriage fraud.
According to the department, Vladimir Volgaev, a Ukrainian native, “concealed and misrepresented his involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle over a thousand firearms components out of the United States and ship them to foreign markets.”
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in a statement: “This case sends a clear message. The United States provided Volgaev with safety, housing, and citizenship, and he returned those gains with malice, including by defrauding one of the federal agencies that provided him benefits. We will not reward this kind of behavior by allowing such an individual to retain U.S. citizenship that should not have been granted in the first place.”
Volgaev was naturalized in 2016, but DOJ officials said that he began “clandestine” purchase, packaging, and smuggling of firearms and parts to Ukraine and Italy as early as 2011. Federal prosecutors said that in 2013, he engaged in federal housing benefits fraud as well as underreporting his income and assets on housing benefits applications. He was convicted of federal charges in 2020.
Cuba native Mirelys Cabrera Diaz, of Hialeah, Florida, “illegally procured her citizenship because she committed unlawful acts – namely a health care fraud conspiracy – before she naturalized that disqualified her from United States citizenship,” the Justice Department explained. In 2019, she was sentenced to 29 months in prison and fined $6 million in restitution. “When she pleaded guilty, she admitted that she willfully conspired to commit health care fraud in the years before she became a United States citizen,” the DOJ confirmed. “She specifically admitted that, between August 2011 and March 2014, she and her co-conspirators paid kickbacks to patient recruiters for referring fraudulent prescriptions to the pharmacy where she worked. She admitted to maintaining a log of how much money was owed to each recruiter for fraudulent prescriptions.”
The DOJ is currently seeking denaturalization for Alec Nasreddine Kassir, a Lebanon native, for reportedly falsely claiming he was living in the country with a US citizen spouse during the three years before filing his naturalization application.
Attorney General Pam Bondi took to X and posted that the actions against these individuals “reflect this Department of Justice’s ongoing efforts to strip citizenship from people who conceal crimes or defraud the American people during the immigration process.” She added, “American citizenship is a sacred privilege – not a cheap status that can be obtained dishonestly.”
Revoking Citizenship
US Citizens and Immigration Services said that, in the past decade, more than 7.9 million people have been naturalized. In 2024, America welcomed 818,500 new citizens.
Denaturalization is not new to the US. Under the Naturalization Act of 1906, causes for revoking citizenship included fraud, lack of “good moral character,” and racial ineligibility. In 1907, Congress expanded the law to include all US-born citizens who had “naturalized in foreign nations and women who had married foreigners,” Historians.org explained. The 1940 Nationality Act and the 1952 McCarran Walter Act added voting in foreign elections and serving in the military of another country as reasons for denaturalization.
The Operation Janus program of the Department of Homeland Security started during former President Barack Obama’s term. In 2018, Baljinder Singh aka Davinder Singh, a naturalized Indian American, had his citizenship revoked after failing to disclose a deportation order and misrepresenting his identity. He was the first case to be finished under this program, which existed to identify those who may have committed naturalization fraud. At the time, “Under Operation Janus, USCIS intends to bring denaturalization proceedings against an additional 1,600 individuals,” reported History.com.
Fast forward to the present. Last year, the DOJ’s Civil Division issued a memo that directed the prioritization of denaturalization cases and outlined ten different reasons a person could have their citizenship revoked. Among them are furthering a criminal gang, cartel or transnational organization, posing a threat to national security, committing felonies that weren’t disclosed during the process of gaining citizenship, cases of those who committed fraud against private individuals, funds or cooperations, and “[a]ny other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
Between 1990 and 2017, a total of 305 denaturalization cases were filed by the DOJ; an average of 11 cases per year, according to research done by Hofstra University Law Professor Irina Manta. During former President Joe Biden’s term, the DOJ filed 64 cases; an average of 16 per year. Under Donald Trump’s first administration, 110 denaturalization cases were referred. And, for the commander-in-chief’s second term so far, at least 64 denaturalization cases have already been filed.
