The Department of Homeland Security is moving to strip U.S. citizenship from 40 people accused of crimes, rapidly expanding the department’s use of little-known denaturalization mechanisms.
Among the crimes that people were convicted of - and for which they faced denaturalization - included aggravated sodomy, transportation of child pornography and sexual abuse of a minor.
Not all were convicted of or pleaded guilty to violent crimes. At least 19 of the 40 people faced denaturalization proceedings for reasons related to accusations of lying on visa forms.
Considering the relatively low crime rate among naturalized citizens, it’s entirely possibly this is the majority of people at risk of this mechanism being used against them.
It’s also another turn of the fascism ratchet.
Most people read that the government is revoking the citizenship of child predator immigrants and won’t bat an eye. Once it’s established, they’ll move to try it with less heinous crimes. Then they’ll skip the crime all together.
There are ~25 million naturalized citizens so this 40 cases is such a tiny fraction that this claim is off by couple orders of magnitude.
From different sources:
In 2024, for every 100,000 people, the violent crime rate was 359 and the property crime rate was 1,760. Immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than the U.S.-born.
You do the math.
But I still think this can be called large scale if normally we don’t see any denationalization attempts. It could be about creating the precedent and establishing the process. If you can take away citizenship for lying on visa forms all you have to do is probably to find anyone admitting to committing a crime before becoming a citizen. Like if you can find video of Cenk Uygur admitting to smoking pot in high school or something…