The Justice Department moved to strip citizenship from 17 naturalized Americans who concealed serious crimes on their naturalization applications, calling it the largest such enforcement action in U.S. history.
Federal prosecutors filed denaturalization complaints in district courts across the country on June 8, targeting naturalized citizens who hid crimes including child sexual abuse, drug trafficking, and visa fraud when they applied for citizenship, according to an official DOJ press release. The cases were filed under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows revocation of naturalization obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.
The cases include some of the most serious offenses imaginable. Fernando Cristancho, 69, a Colombian-born Roman Catholic priest, entered the United States as a religious worker and used his position to gain access to minors. According to the DOJ, Cristancho groomed and sexually abused a parishioner from the ages of 11 to 13, later pleading guilty to coercion and enticement and receiving a 22-year prison sentence. Prosecutors allege he concealed that ongoing criminal conduct throughout the naturalization process. Neeraj Sharma, 50, the owner and CEO of Magnavision LLC, an IT staffing company in New Jersey, signed and filed 11 fraudulent H-1B visa petitions containing forged signatures of executives at a major financial institution, the department said. Sharma became a naturalized citizen in 2017 by falsely declaring he had never committed a crime or misled government officials. He was later convicted of fraud and visa misuse for offenses dated between 2015 and 2017.
The 17 defendants come from more than a dozen countries, including Haiti, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Somalia, India, Jamaica, China, the Philippines, and the former Yugoslavia, according to the department's filing. Other cases involve a Haitian man who sexually abused his own minor daughter while concealing that conduct during naturalization, and the daughter of a Colombian drug trafficker who hid bigamy and years of wire fraud and money laundering from immigration officials before becoming a naturalized citizen in 2009.
The scale of the current enforcement marks a stark departure from the recent past. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has filed 52 civil denaturalization complaints, more than double the 24 filed across the entire four years of the Biden administration, according to ABC News. Under Biden, the Justice Department's dedicated denaturalization unit was effectively dismantled. The Trump administration reconstituted it and, in a June 2025 enforcement memorandum, formally designated denaturalization one of the Civil Division's top five enforcement priorities, according to Newsweek.
The historical numbers sharpen the contrast further. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of just eleven denaturalization cases per year, according to data cited by CBS News. Trump's first term raised that to roughly 42 per year. Under Biden, the pace fell back sharply. The current administration is on track to surpass every prior benchmark on record.
The June 8 action follows a separate round announced about a month earlier, in which the DOJ moved to denaturalize 12 individuals who had concealed terrorist ties, war crimes, and espionage from immigration authorities. The two rounds together represent 29 new cases filed in a matter of weeks, a level of output the department's own records show has no precedent.
The Road Through the Courts
Denaturalization is a civil proceeding, and the government must prove its case before a federal judge. The process can be slow, and defendants may contest it. Legal experts note, however, that cases like these, where a subsequent criminal conviction is already on record for the very offense the defendant concealed, present a particularly strong factual basis for the government's claim. The concealment and the crime are, in many instances, one and the same documented record.
A successful outcome in each case would revoke the defendant's certificate of naturalization, returning the individual to their prior immigration status and potentially making them eligible for removal. The Justice Department has signaled that the current cases are not the last. Newsweek reported that the department is reviewing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in its history. How quickly federal courts move through that backlog will determine the true reach of what is already the most aggressive citizenship integrity campaign the U.S. government has ever launched.
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