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In keeping with the Trump administration's focus on curtailing illegal immigration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director L. Francis Cissna announced in June 2018 that the agency was doubling down on efforts to detect fraudulent naturalization cases and would seek to have the citizenship of individuals found to have applied under false pretenses revoked. The end result of such proceedings is known as denaturalization, a term of art that is unfamiliar to most Americans and, as such, prompted dozens of readers to ask us about the accuracy of media reports concerning the USCIS initiative. Here is a broad outline of the push, as provided by Cissna to the Associated Press: Concurrently, the Department of Homeland Security's 2019 budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) calls for the hiring of 300 additional special agents and 212 support personnel to assist in the investigation and prosecution of such cases. Mae Ngai, a history professor at Columbia University, told National Public Radio during a July 2018 interview that it was the first time in nearly 75 years that the federal government had programmatically sought the denaturalization of American citizens: As Director Cissna's remarks suggested, denaturalizing individuals who obtained citizenship illegally is a multi-agency process in which the USCIS basically functions as a fraud detector, reviewing cases where the use of fake identities is suspected and referring them to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) as necessary for civil or criminal proceedings. A recent case in Florida that resulted in the denaturalization and imprisonment of an asylum seeker from Haiti illustrated how the process works. The following account was talen from a USCIS news release dated 5 June 2018: A DOJ news release painted a broader picture of that investigation and the various agencies and programs involved: Operation Second Look is one of two Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programs devoted to ferreting out fraudulent naturalization claims. The other, higher-level program is Operation Janus, an initiative launched during the Obama administration to prevent aliens who received a final removal order under a different identity from obtaining immigration benefits. Operation Second Look is described in ICE's 2019 budget overview as a program created to address leads received from Operation Janus. The original impetus for Operation Janus came from the discovery that hundreds of aliens from so-called special interest countries (those regarded as posing national security concerns for the U.S.) who had been ordered to leave the country managed subsequently to obtain citizenship or legal permanent resident status using other identities. However, the operation yielded a relatively small number of investigations and no denaturalizations at all under the Obama administration, a situation Trump's Justice Department immediately commenced to remedy. In September 2017, the DOJ announced the filing of denaturalization complaints against three individuals who allegedly obtained naturalized citizenship by fraudulent means more than a decade ago. In January 2018, the DOJ secured its first-ever Janus-related denaturalization order against one of those individuals. As noted in the Justice Department's announcements of these actions, they were accomplished with the participation of USCIS, months before Director Cissna announced staff increases for the purpose of handling such cases. The creation of an office devoted exclusively to these activities speaks to the Trump administration's resolve to denaturalize citizens deemed to have obtained citizenship by illegitimate means under existing U.S. immigration laws.
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