Justice Department Asks Courts to Revoke Citizenship of 40 Naturalized Americans

The Justice Department said Monday that it has filed civil complaints asking federal courts to revoke the citizenship of 40 naturalized Americans it accuses of obtaining citizenship unlawfully. NBC News first reported the action earlier in the day, citing a draft of the department's announcement.

The complaints were filed in 19 federal districts from August through Oct. 2, and the department described them as the largest volume it has submitted in a single period under the Trump administration. Attorney General Todd Blanche called the announcement "the largest denaturalization effort in modern history." "Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship," said Brett A. Shumate, the assistant attorney general who heads the Civil Division.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a naturalized citizen can lose citizenship if the naturalization was illegally procured or obtained by concealing a material fact or by willful misrepresentation. Denaturalization is a civil process rather than a criminal prosecution, and the department's release says the claims in the complaints are allegations only and that there has been no determination of liability. A federal judge must decide in each case whether the government has met its legal burden, and the people named can fight the allegations with their own lawyers. If the government wins, a person can lose citizenship and may face removal proceedings, depending on the circumstances.

Among those named is Jinchao Wei, a former Navy sailor who worked as an engineer on the amphibious assault ship USS Essex. A federal jury convicted him in August 2025 of six crimes, including espionage, and a judge in San Diego sentenced him in January to 200 months in prison. The department said at the time that he was paid more than $12,000 for the information he sold to an intelligence officer working for China. According to the new complaint summary, Wei had begun conspiring to sell military secrets to China by February 2022 and became a citizen that May under a law that speeds naturalization for people serving honorably in the armed forces. The complaint alleges that he concealed his crimes and did not complete five years of honorable service before he was separated from the Navy under other-than-honorable conditions.

Another complaint, filed in the Middle District of Florida, names Ping Li, who pleaded guilty in August 2024 to conspiring to act as an agent of the Chinese government without notifying the attorney general. The department says Li worked at the direction of China's Ministry of State Security from at least 2012, collecting information on Chinese dissidents, pro-democracy advocates, Falun Gong members and U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations, and passed the ministry sensitive information from his employers, a major U.S. telecommunications company and an international information technology company. Its single-count complaint argues that his conduct is prima facie evidence he was not attached to the principles of the Constitution when he naturalized.

Twenty-one of the 40 case summaries in the department's release cite a criminal conviction or guilty plea, including convictions for sexual abuse of children, voluntary manslaughter, tax evasion and securities fraud. In most of those cases, the department says, the conduct began before the person became a citizen and was concealed during naturalization. The other 19 summaries mention no conviction and instead allege immigration fraud, such as assumed or stolen identities, fraudulent or bigamous marriages, visa fraud and earlier deportation, exclusion or removal orders that the applicants did not disclose.

In June 2025, the Civil Division directed its lawyers to "prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence." In early August, the department announced 25 complaints filed over the previous two weeks, and Blanche, then the acting attorney general, called them the largest coordinated denaturalization effort in the department's history. That announcement said the department had filed 123 civil denaturalization complaints since Jan. 20, 2025.

Court records compiled by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse showed at least 105 civil denaturalization suits filed in the first seven months of 2026, including 50 in July, compared with roughly 125 from 2008 through 2025, Newsweek reported in September. The Brennan Center for Justice has put the yearly average from 1990 to 2017 at about 11 cases.

Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, told Newsweek that civil denaturalization cases have no recognized statute of limitations, carry no right to a court-appointed lawyer and require clear and convincing evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. She warned that higher filing volumes and enforcement targets could encourage marginal cases and said, "The biggest issue is that it makes citizenship feel less secure for naturalized citizens." Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told the magazine that the agency "has a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who lies or misrepresents themselves during the naturalization process."