DOJ Files 12 New Denaturalization Cases as Acting AG Warns Naturalized Citizens 'Should Be Worried'

The Filings

On Friday, May 8, 2026, the Justice Department filed denaturalization complaints in federal courts across the country against 12 naturalized U.S. citizens — the largest single-day denaturalization push since the Cold War. The named defendants include a Colombian-born Catholic priest convicted of sexually abusing a minor, a Moroccan-born man with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, a Somali immigrant who pleaded guilty to providing material support to al-Shabaab, a former Gambian police officer accused of war crimes, and Victor Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia who confessed last year to a half-century career as a Cuban intelligence asset.

The selection of defendants is the point. By front-loading the announcement with terrorists, war criminals, and a spy, the Trump DOJ stages a press cycle in which any objection to mass denaturalization sounds like a defense of al-Qaeda — even as the underlying legal machinery being normalized has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with stripping citizenship from millions of naturalized Americans on increasingly thin pretexts.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

From 1990 through 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of eleven denaturalization cases per year — a tool reserved almost entirely for Nazis, war criminals, and the rare confirmed spy. During Trump’s first term, the average jumped to between 25 and 42. The Biden administration filed about 16 per year.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche boasted to CBS News that the current administration would, “in about a week,” surpass the total number of denaturalization filings the Biden administration submitted in four years. By his own count, Trump’s DOJ is now pursuing more denaturalization cases than at any point in the past nine years and accelerating. The 12 cases on May 8 alone match an entire pre-Trump year of filings.

”They Should Be Worried”

Asked by CBS News whether naturalized Americans should be alarmed, Blanche delivered the line the administration wanted on tape: “If you’re going to come and become a citizen in this country, but you’re going to do it by fraud, you’re going to do it in a way that’s illegal, you should be worried.” Pressed on the roughly 24 million naturalized citizens currently living in the United States, he conceded that most are not in danger — only “a very small percentage” — but insisted that those who are “should be” afraid.

It is the same rhetorical move Trump’s administration uses across every escalation: target a politically indefensible subgroup, then use the legal precedent and bureaucratic capacity to expand. The Alien Enemies Act was first deployed in 2025 against alleged Venezuelan gang members; within weeks, it was being used to disappear barbers and asylum seekers to a Salvadoran prison. ICE was first pointed at violent offenders; it is now arresting parents at school drop-offs.

A Tool Built for Mass Use

Denaturalization is uniquely powerful precisely because it cannot be reversed by a future administration the way a deportation can. Once a federal judge revokes citizenship, the former citizen becomes deportable to a country they may not have lived in for decades, often losing pension rights, voting rights, and legal standing to challenge further government action. Civil libertarians have warned for years that any administration that revives the practice at scale will inevitably broaden the definition of “fraud” to include political speech, paperwork errors, and dissident activity.

The Trump administration has not hidden that direction. The president has publicly mused about denaturalizing political opponents — including Rep. Ilhan Omar and his former ally Elon Musk — and his Justice Department has built up a dedicated denaturalization section with expanded staffing. The May 8 cases, dressed in the unimpeachable narrative of terrorists and child abusers, are the proof of concept for a legal architecture that will not stop there.

The Pattern

What Blanche announced on Friday is not law enforcement. It is the construction of a permanent two-tier citizenship regime, in which 24 million Americans hold their nationality on conditional terms set by a president who openly threatens to strip it from people he dislikes. The cases against terrorists are real. So is the precedent being laid down beneath them.