The Brief

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

Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving district attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.

At least one person has already been denaturalized in recent weeks. On June 13, a judge ordered the revocation of the citizenship of Elliott Duke, who uses they/them pronouns. Duke is an American military veteran originally from the U.K. who was convicted for distributing child sexual abuse material — something they later admitted they were doing prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.

Denaturalization is a tactic that was heavily used during the McCarthy era of the late 1940's and the early 1950's and one that was expanded during the Obama administration and grew further during President Trump's first term. It's 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 — an especially concerning move, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

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. "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 said.

The DOJ and Trump White House declined to comment for this story.

People say the Pledge of Allegiance as part of receiving their citizenship at a Nationalization Ceremony hosted by the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park on Oct. 1, 2024 in Plains, Georgia. The Justice Department is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes, according to a June memo.<br>

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A broad criteria

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.

Other immigration experts point to another part of the guidance, which gives U.S. attorneys broader discretion to determine other eligible denaturalization cases. "These categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case," the memo states, and priorities for denaturalization can include "any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue."

Steve Lubet, professor emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, said that language appears to grant the federal government "wide discretion" on deciding whom to target.

"Many of the categories are so vague as to be meaningless. It isn't even clear that they relate to fraudulent procurement, as opposed to post-naturalization conduct," he said.

Von Spakovsky argues, "When we extend the opportunity for naturalization to aliens, we are granting them a great privilege — the privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen. Quite frankly, I don't think it matters whether someone was a human trafficker or a drug smuggler before they entered the country, while they were applying for citizenship, or after their naturalization."

He continued, "Anyone who has abused the privilege of the opportunity of becoming a U.S. citizen should have that citizenship revoked when they engage in such reprehensible behavior."

Lubet, who has written extensively about denaturalization, also raised concerns about the potential impact on families — particularly children whose citizenship was derived through a parent whose naturalization was later revoked.

"What struck me is the ripple effect that this would have on children who were naturalized through their parents," he said. " People who thought they were safely American and had done nothing wrong can suddenly be at risk of losing citizenship."

The DOJ didn't respond to questions about how this could impact children of naturalized parents or what happens in cases where an individual would be left stateless by being denaturalized.

A woman from Peru and her children are detained and escorted to a bus by federal agents following an appearance at immigration court on June 23, 2025, in San Antonio.

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A slippery slope

The order to revoke the citizenship of Elliott Duke, the Army vet originally from the U.K., may be one of the first examples of the Trump administration's aggressive denaturalization efforts in Trump's second term.

In 2012, while serving in Germany, Duke began receiving and distributing child sexual abuse material via email and the internet, according to the DOJ.

In January the following year, Duke became a naturalized American citizen, but revoked their U.K. citizenship to do so.

The DOJ filed a legal case against Duke back in February of this year in Louisiana seeking Duke's denaturalization based both on the conviction for child sexual abuse material and the failure to disclose their crimes during the naturalization process.

In the months it took to get a decision on their case, Duke tried to get a defense attorney to help fight the case — to no avail, they told NPR. Duke was also unable to travel to Louisiana for the court proceedings.

"If you commit serious crimes before you become a U.S. citizen and then lie about them during your naturalization process, the Justice Department will discover the truth and come after you," Shumate, the assistant attorney general, said in a statement.

Duke is still trying to determine what options exist for an appeal and how this impacts their current prison term. But for now, Duke is effectively stateless.

"My heart shattered when I read the lines [of the order]. My world broke apart," Duke said.

Regardless of the crimes Duke committed, the situation sets a dangerous precedent, said Laura Bingham, executive director of the Temple University Institute for Law Innovation and Technology. If the government continues to open the question of citizenship up for people who have already received it, this creates a slippery slope for everyone, she said.

Citizenship "is not supposed to be something that you can continuously open up for some people, and you can't for others," Bingham said.

A woman from Peru signals through the barred and tinted windows of a bus after she was detained following an appearance at immigration court on June 23, 2025, in San Antonio.

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Denaturalization goes back to McCarthy era

In a  2019 report co-authored by Robertson, Un(Civil) Denaturalization, she writes that denaturalization was wielded frequently as a political tool in the McCarthy era.

"At the height of denaturalization, there were about 22,000 cases a year of denaturalization filed, and this was on a smaller population. It was huge," she told NPR.

The Supreme Court stepped in and issued a ruling in 1967 that said that denaturalization is "inconsistent with the American form of democracy, because it creates two levels of citizenship," Robertson explained.

"So the United States went from having 20,000 some cases of denaturalization a year to having just a handful, like 1,2,5,6, very small numbers for years after 1967," Robertson said.

That is, until the Obama administration, which used new digital tools to find potential cases of naturalization fraud going back decades. Under Operation Janus, an initiative launched by immigration and justice officials in the Obama era, they claimed a national security interest in examining potential cases of immigration fraud that could be tied to terrorism.

Then Trump's first administration sought to significantly expand the government's use of denaturalization and chose to file denaturalization cases against individuals via civil courts rather than criminal.

Despite her concerns about the new criteria, Robertson is skeptical how many cases they would apply to.

"The thing is there just aren't very many cases that fit within [the Trump administration's] framework of priorities [for denaturalization]," Robertson said.

"So if they're really intending maximal enforcement, I think what they're going to end up doing is focusing on people who have not committed any serious infraction, or maybe any infraction at all, but people for whom there is a possibility" that there are grounds to revoke citizenship, Robertson said. "It fits in with the other ways that we've seen immigration enforcement happening" under this administration.

Do you have information about the Trump administration's denaturalization effort? Have you been served in a case trying to revoke your naturalized citizenship? Reach out to the authors through encrypted communications on Signal. Jaclyn Diaz is available on Signal at jaclynmdiaz.54 and Juliana Kim is available at julianahkim.82.
Copyright 2025 NPR

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In 2019, first-year Gov. Gavin Newsom inherited a state flush with cash. With a $21.4 billion budget surplus to play with, an ambitious Newsom invested billions in affordable housing, child care and healthcare expansion while paying down the state’s debt and shoring up reserves.

The next governor won’t be that lucky.

When Newsom unveils his last spending plan as governor Friday, he will do so with the specter of a projected $18 billion deficit — the result of the state’s fast-growing spending, federal funding losses and heightened economic uncertainties under President Donald Trump’s administration.

The deficit could balloon to $35 billion annually in the next few years if state leaders don’t pursue long-term solutions, namely making sustainable revenue increases or cutting spending, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the nonpartisan fiscal adviser to lawmakers.

But neither will be appealing options to Newsom and legislative leaders this year.

They have repeatedly resisted increasing taxes on average Californians and high-income earners alike — a politically dicey pitch to make in a state with high tax rates and increasing revenue. Spending cuts are equally painful to swallow, especially for Democrats running for re-election in November who have fought to expand services, such as Medi-Cal, that may now be rolled back.

For Newsom, a lame-duck governor with presidential aspirations, there is even less incentive to address the state’s long-term budget health through major policy changes, political strategists say.

“It’s not an uncommon occurrence in California for a departing governor to leave a note on the new governor’s desk that they’ve got a budget deficit,” said longtime Democratic consultant Garry South.

But how Newsom tackles the structural deficit will almost certainly have implications for his expected presidential bid. State Republicans, such as Assemblymember David Tangipa of Fresno, are already blaming the budget problem on Newsom’s mismanagement. “A Newsom presidency would be a fiscal and governance disaster of historic proportions,” Tangipa wrote in a December op-ed.

It’s the fourth consecutive year in Newsom’s tenure that the state is projecting a deficit even as revenue grows. In the past, state Democratic leaders resorted to temporary fixes such as internal borrowing, deferring payments, one-time cuts and drawing from California’s rainy day fund to avoid cutting into the social safety net.

But that cushion is deflating: The state’s reserve stands at $14 billion, half its peak balance, after two years of withdrawals. State leaders have borrowed more than $20 billion from other state funds, debts that will come due in later years. Continuing to rely on those options would leave the state “undeniably less prepared” for an economic downturn, the LAO warned.

“Eventually you are going to run out of Band-aids,” said Steve Maviglio, a Democratic strategist who worked for then-Gov. Gray Davis during a massive budget deficit. Newsom "has used every trick in the book, and after a certain point, there’s nothing left.”

More healthcare cuts to come?

Newsom has not indicated whether he’ll consider cuts to Medi-Cal, the state’s primary health insurance program for low-income residents. But as the state’s most expensive program, it is an attractive target. More than half of the $200 billion program’s funding comes from the federal government.

Last year, as Newsom and legislators scrambled to close a $12 billion budget gap, they froze new Medi-Cal enrollment for undocumented immigrants, charged immigrant enrollees a $30 monthly premium and delayed cutting certain benefits. The cost of Medi-Cal has been rising faster than expected, forcing the state Legislature to allocate $6.2 billion midyear to prevent a shortfall.

The decision was contentious, with some healthcare advocates and Democratic lawmakers slamming their leaders for creating a “two-tiered healthcare system” that deemed immigrants less worthy of quality coverage.

“That was an incredibly disappointing backslide,” said Amanda McAllister-Wallner, executive director of Health Access California, which advocates for universal healthcare.

This year, Trump’s budget reduced the federal government’s share of funding to Medi-Cal, requiring the state to pay more to provide the same benefits. California is projected to spend at least $1.3 billion more to implement that change, a figure that could reach $5 billion by fiscal year 2029-30, the LAO estimated.

The Martin Luther King Community Hospital in Los Angeles.

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Assemblymember Mia Bonta, an Oakland Democrat who chairs the Assembly Health Committee, said solving the state’s budget crunch shouldn’t come at the expense of health care.

“California needs its state and federal leaders to look for more innovative solutions to fill the gaps, make healthcare affordable, and keep our families healthy,” she said in a statement that did not offer specific alternatives.

Any cuts to Medi-Cal could bring political consequences for Democrats who often pride themselves on expanding social services. Rolling back Medi-Cal could hurt Newsom’s legacy, too, since it was under him that the state began offering Medi-Cal to immigrants.

“Democrats are the party of expanding healthcare,” Maviglio said. “To slash it goes against everything they stand for.”

McAllister-Wallner acknowledged she isn’t optimistic about the budget outlook. But she said she hopes the state finds new revenue through taxing corporations instead of making cuts to vulnerable populations.

If “we are addressing this through cuts only, and cuts to the most vulnerable, that’s … not the leadership that we are looking for,” she said.

State leaders could also walk back some of last year’s funding commitments in other areas. While state lawmakers negotiated $500 million for homelessness to counties and delayed it until next year, it is not guaranteed. Newsom, who has blamed the state’s homelessness problem on local governments, could withhold the money.

Newsom also promised last year he’d reach a deal with Bay Area transit advocates over state funding. But last month, in light of the budget shortfall, Newsom urged advocates to dip into previously allocated dollars to save the regional transit network, instead of a $750 million loan the advocates had requested.

Taxing the rich a nonstarter for Newsom

It’ll be hard to muster the political will in Sacramento to raise taxes.

Former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Los Angeles Democrat running for state superintendent of public instruction, said he’s long supported higher taxes on industries that have “skated away from taxation for a long time.”

But even the most progressive Democrats in California have had little appetite to raise taxes, he said, because many represent affluent areas such as Silicon Valley where their wealthy donors live.

Even when the state faced a projected $56 billion deficit over two years in 2023, Rendon said Democrats were “shrugging” at the problem and pointing to the state’s reserves as a solution, which he said reflected a culture of reliance on the rainy day fund.

This year, Newsom has already spoken out against a proposed labor-backed wealth tax ballot measure, consistent with his past opposition to similar proposals.

The ballot measure, titled “The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act” and filed with the state attorney general’s office in October, seeks to tack a one-time 5% tax on those with a net worth of at least $1 billion and use the money to fund the state’s healthcare and education programs. The effort is led by the SEIU-UHW, a powerful labor union representing healthcare workers, and St. John’s Community Health, one of the largest nonprofit healthcare providers in Los Angeles County.

State. Sen. Roger Niello, a Roseville Republican and vice chair of the Senate Budget Committee, applauded Newsom’s opposition to the proposed tax increase.

“To have a situation where we have developed an increasing deficit in the face of an economy that is not in recession, and revenues are increasing, it would seem to be silly to solve that by further increasing revenue,” he said.

While taxing the rich is a popular Democratic talking point, backing a proposal like that could mean alienating the wealthy donors Newsom will likely rely on for his presidential run.

There would also be no political gain for Newsom in his last year to stabilize the state’s progressive tax structure, which heavily relies on high-income earners, despite him promising to do so when he took office.

“He’s going to make more enemies doing it than he would not doing it,” Maviglio said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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After just over two months, Southern California Edison has drawn more than 1,800 customers to a compensation program meant to settle scores of lawsuits against the company over the deadly Eaton Fire. As of Monday, the company has made offers to 82 of those who applied, Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison’s parent company Edison International, told CalMatters.

Fire survivors, who have been providing feedback to Edison since before it launched the settlement program still have strong criticisms of the utility’s compensation effort, called the “Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program.” They complain that it requires participants to forego lawsuits against the company and blocks them from seeking further compensation for fire-related health claims. Many said the program’s payment caps, which limit the amount claimants can receive, were too low and enable Edison to pay less than the utility might otherwise owe should it be found responsible for the fire.

The Eaton Fire burned 14,000 acres of Los Angeles County in January and killed 19 people. While the official cause has not yet been determined, a leading theory is that Edison’s equipment sparked the blaze. The U.S. Department of Justice is among those who have blamed the utility for the fire.

Insurance money and personal savings are running out for people who lost homes, livelihoods and loved ones in the fire, they and their advocates say. Many are unhoused or facing housing insecurity. One survey estimated 80% of Altadena residents were still displaced by the fire as of October. The Eaton Fire Survivors Network, a prominent grassroots organization, called on Edison to provide up to $200,000 per displaced household “based on verified costs” to help cover housing costs.

“It’s Edison’s responsibility to solve all of this,” Joy Chen, executive director of the group, said. “It’s their fire."

About $7.6 billion in insurance claims related to the Eaton Fire were paid out as of November, according to the California Department of Insurance, the most recent figures available. About 90% of the payout was for residential property.

Edison offered a collective total of $34.4 million to settle the 82 claims, and none of the offers were declined, it said.

About half of the claims that received an offer from Edison as of December, Pizarro said, were for total losses, and about half were related to smoke and ash damage. While he did not provide specific numbers, Pizarro said that the claims were spread across geography, income levels and home values. Many of those that have been made offers are part of the program’s fast-track option.

At a Dec. 16 press conference held by the survivors network, displaced residents spoke about how unstable housing and the loss of their homes has affected their lives. Gabriel Gonzalez, a plumbing company owner, lost his home, business and about $80,000 worth of tools in the fire. He lived out of his car for an extended period before receiving a small amount of financial assistance that helped him stay in a rental for a few months. But that money is expected to run out this month.

“As of the first of January, I’ll probably be back in my car,” he said at the event.

Pizarro told CalMatters that Edison will not be providing money to residents for housing outside of its compensation program, citing the need to validate expenses. The survivors network request for housing cost assistance was limited to verifiable costs.

One criticism of the program was that children do not receive the same compensation as adults. Under the current version of the program, children receive between 50% and 65% of the compensation adults receive for a loss of their residency, depending on the damage category. If their primary home that they live in was destroyed, adults would get $115,000 and children would receive $75,000. These rates are slightly higher than a draft version of the plan Edison released in the fall.

An open letter at the time from the Eaton Fire Survivor’s Network said giving children less than an equal valuation to adults “treats their suffering as lesser when it is, in reality, greater.”

Pizarro said Edison went with a lower valuation because children often don’t receive as much as adults do under similar programs and adults “end up bearing more responsibility and more cost” for the household and “arrangements for the children.”

“The reality is that adults carry much more burden here,” he said, “and so it’s fair that they, you know, that we have more compensation targeted at the adults.”

Another frustration those affected by the fire expressed was the requirement that participants waive their right to sue the company. Legal representatives of fire survivors who are suing the company cautioned that the settlement program through Edison could short people of any damages and suffering compensation a court might award, as well as potential long term health care compensation or monitoring.

“We are approaching this as a way to settle litigation,” Pizarro said. “It is a form of legal settlement, and legal settlements are typically settlements of all matters, otherwise they’re not really, you know, they’re not really a conclusion to litigation.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.