The United States’ Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship. 

The leaders of the department are instructing their lawyers to prioritize denaturalization for cases involving naturalized citizens who commit specific crimes. Additionally, district attorneys are being given more freedom to decide when to use this strategy, as detailed in a memo released on June 11.

This directive primarily targets U.S. citizens who were not born in the country. Recent data indicates that approximately 25 million immigrants have gone through naturalization processes.

Recent developments have already seen denaturalization actions taking place. A judge ruled on June 13 to strip Elliott Duke, a U.S. military veteran originally from the U.K., of their citizenship. Duke, who identifies with they/them pronouns, was convicted of distributing child sexual abuse material, a crime they confessed to committing before becoming a citizen of the U.S.

Denaturalization  is meant to strip citizenship from those who may have lied about their criminal convictions or membership in illegal groups like the Nazi party, or communists during McCarthyism, on their citizenship applications. 

Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate wrote in the memo that pursuing denaturalization will be among the agency’s top five enforcement priorities for the civil division. 

“The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” he said. 

The focus on denaturalization is just the latest step by the Trump administration to reshape the nation’s immigration system across all levels of government, turning it into a major focus across multiple federal agencies. That has come with redefining who is let into the United States or has the right to be an American. 

Since his return to office, the president has sought to end birthright citizenship and scale back refugee programs. 

But immigration law experts expressed serious concerns about the effort’s constitutionality, and how this could impact families of naturalized citizens. 

The DOJ memo says that the federal government will pursue denaturalization cases via civil litigation, which Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, says is a concerning move. 

In civil proceedings, any individual subject to denaturalization is not entitled to an attorney, Robertson said. There is also a lower burden of proof for the government to reach, and it is far easier and faster to reach a conclusion in these cases. 

Robertson says that stripping Americans of citizenship through civil litigation violates due process and infringes on the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. 

Hans von Spakovsky, with the conservative Heritage Foundation, supports the DOJ’s denaturalization efforts. 

Spakovsky said: “I do not understand how anyone could possibly be opposed to the Justice Department taking such action to protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals, and terrorists.” 

As for the due process concerns, von Spakovsky said, “Nothing prevents that alien from hiring their own lawyer to represent them. They are not entitled to have the government — and thus the American taxpayer — pay for their lawyer.” 

“That is not a ‘due process’ violation since all immigration proceedings are civil matters and no individuals— including American citizens — are entitled to government-furnished lawyers in any type of civil matter,” he added. 

According to this new memo, the DOJ is expanding its criteria of which crimes put individuals at risk of losing their citizenship. That includes national security violations and committing acts of fraud against individuals or against the government, like Paycheck Protection Program loan fraud or Medicaid or Medicare fraud. 

“To see that this administration is plotting out how they’re going to expand its use in ways that we have not seen before is very shocking and very concerning,” said Sameera Hafiz, policy director of the Immigration Legal Resource Center, a national advocacy organization providing legal training in immigration law. 

“It is kind of, in a way, trying to create a second class of U.S. citizens:” where one set of Americans is safe and those not born in the country are still at risk of losing their hard-fought citizenship, she said.