Trump immigration crackdown: Denaturalization just a drop in the bucket

President-elect Trump’s incoming administration is expected to take aim at legal immigration in addition to cracking down on the illegal variety, slowing the pace of application approvals and redirecting resources to look for fraud in old applications, including naturalizations.

The first Trump administration pushed for more denaturalizations, an initiative that incoming White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has said will be “supercharged” the second time around.

Though that effort is primed to make a big media impact, it’s unlikely to make a statistically significant dent in immigrant populations.

“I think it's safe to assume that there will not be an attempt to denaturalize Elon Musk. I think we can probably guess that one. But I think you could end up having a chilling effect on people,” said Stuart Anderson, director of the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).

“They kind of just got started on denaturalization efforts, and it's certainly something that can continue, but I can't imagine the numbers would be as big as you might see, in terms of comparison to mass deportation, or simply just blocking green card categories, such as blocking the diversity category, for example, which would be like 50,000 people a year.”

Though denaturalizations are exceedingly rare, the first Trump administration made at least two major efforts to put them in the spotlight.

In 2018, Francis Cissna, then-director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency was hiring a team of lawyers to refer 1,600 cases of naturalization fraud to the Department of Justice (DOJ). And in 2020, the DOJ launched its own denaturalization initiative, looking to push more cases through court.

At the time, CNN reported the DOJ had filed a total of 228 cases between 2008 and 2020, 94 of which were filed during the first three years of the Trump administration.

And denaturalizations became more difficult for the government to prove in 2017, when the Supreme Court decided a landmark case setting a high burden of proof for the government to successfully prosecute naturalization application fraud.

In essence, naturalized citizens can lose their U.S. citizenship if they willfully concealed or misrepresented a fact in their applications or interactions with U.S. immigration officials, and that fact was material to their eligibility for naturalization.

Musk, for example, who allegedly worked illegally on a student visa and has publicly discussed his use of illegal drugs, could theoretically face scrutiny over the legality of his path to citizenship under a strict interpretation of the rules. Another famous potential target: Prince Harry, who has been attacked by the conservative Heritage Foundation over his own immigration process and use of illicit drugs.

“I wouldn’t protect him,” Trump said of the prince in February. “He would be on his own, if it was down to me.”

In 2016, before Trump won his first presidential election, an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) watchdog found 315,000 fingerprint files for immigrants who had been deported or convicted of crimes had not been uploaded to a database that cross-checks immigrant applicants’ identities.

Among those 315,000 files, officials found that only 858 people had been ordered deported but had successfully applied for citizenship under a different identity.

Despite the low incidence of fraud, even in a list of deportees and convicts, the first Trump administration channeled significant resources away from processing new applications and toward digging for dirt in old files.

In fiscal 2019, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pulled more than $200 million from processing to fund “Operation Second Look” and “Operation Janus,” the Obama-era initiative born out of the internal report highlighting the fingerprint database.

And organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union warned the denaturalization force was likely to discourage some eligible legal permanent residents from seeking naturalization.

“I think what we're going to see in the second Trump administration is a continuation of attempts that started the first administration to cut legal immigration through various means. We’re likely to be surprised at some of the actions, but I think the overall goal will be to have less legal immigration, and over the course of the coming decades, that could even be felt,” Anderson said.

“But in the more immediate term, you're likely to see a lot of disappointed Americans who are looking to sponsor loved ones. You're going to see some disappointed employers, and you're very likely to see American consumers not able to get some of the services they want to be provided, being provided for them,” he added.

While denaturalizations are unlikely to have a demographic impact by themselves, some economists fear reduced immigration could slow the broader economy.

Because of the dual impact of coronavirus and restrictive policies on immigration between 2016 and 2022, GDP growth in 2022 was an estimated 1.3 percentage points lower than it would have been, according to an NFAP study by economist Madeline Zavodny.

Many economists fear a second Trump administration will enact restrictive policies and reassign resources away from servicing applications, stunting labor force growth — a major factor in broader economic growth.

“Historically, we have had a growing labor force almost throughout all of American history that has contributed to the fast, rapid economic growth in the United States. And if you remove a major source of that labor growth, whether it's undocumented workers or legal immigrants, you're going to likely slow down the overall growth rate,” said Robert Lynch, professor of economics at Washington College.