In a sit-down interview with CBS News, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the administration is pursuing denaturalization cases. We will see more of them than we have in the past 9 years. People who obtained citizenship by lying should be “worried,” he warned.
“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,” Blanche said.
The CBS reporter asked who is being targeted by the denaturalization campaign. Blanche responded, “We are not limiting ourselves to anybody in particular, except to say that, unfortunately, and I think you’re going to hear more about this in the coming days and weeks, there are a lot of individuals who are citizens who shouldn’t be.”
Blanche didn’t say how many or who. Hopefully, the Mamdani and Omar families are included. It looks like the hospice, daycare, and other Medicaid fraudsters will have to go home.
The procedure to denaturalize is rare, but different times call for different approaches. We have terrorists in this country.
Judges will have to be convinced to make this take place.
The Justice Department has to prove that a person obtained their citizenship fraudulently, such as by lying on their applications. Between 1990 and 2017, federal officials filed slightly more than 300 denaturalization cases, averaging 11 per year.
According to CBS, last year, the Justice Department published a memo instructing officials to prioritize broader categories of people for denaturalization, including those accused of financial fraud.
Naturalized Citizens Are Alarmed
The campaign has allegedly alarmed some of the more than 24 million naturalized citizens, CBS reports.
Blanche was asked about that. He said he does not know “why they would be concerned” if they did not obtain their citizenship illegally.
“I don’t think it’s true that those 24 million citizens are worried. I think there’s a very small percentage of them who are worried. And yes, they should be,” he added.
Blanche said he was not sure why the campaign is “even controversial.”
“We shouldn’t tolerate fraud,” he said. “We shouldn’t tolerate lies.”
Blanche noted there’s a process for people who are targets of a denaturalization effort to challenge the procedure. He conceded that revoking someone’s citizenship is a “drastic consequence,” but stressed that committing fraud to obtain that citizenship is also a “drastic action.”