The Justice Department said on Monday, October 5, that it is asking courts to take U.S. citizenship back from 40 people it says lied to get it.
Story Snapshot
- The department filed 40 civil cases in 19 federal districts between August 21 and October 2 to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans.
- Officials say each person hid crimes or other key facts when applying, including spying for China, voluntary manslaughter, money laundering, tax evasion and crimes against children.
- Among them is former Navy sailor Jinchao Wei, who became a citizen about two months after he began conspiring to sell military secrets to China. He is serving 200 months in prison.
- Attorney General Todd Blanche called it the “largest denaturalization effort in modern history.”
Denaturalization means taking citizenship away from someone who was not born an American but became one later. Federal law allows it only when citizenship was gained illegally or by hiding an important fact or lying on purpose. The department says all 40 people hid crimes or other facts that would have kept them from becoming citizens. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, who heads the department’s Civil Division, put it plainly: “Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship.”
The Navy Sailor at the Center of the Case List
Jinchao Wei, 26, was born in China and joined the U.S. Navy in 2021, shortly before he turned 21. By February 2022, prosecutors say, he had begun conspiring to sell military secrets to a Chinese intelligence officer. In May 2022 he became a U.S. citizen through a fast-track process for active-duty troops. The department says he hid what he was doing during that process.
A federal jury convicted Wei in August 2025 of conspiracy to commit espionage, espionage and illegally exporting defense-related technical data. He was sentenced to 200 months in prison and left the Navy under other-than-honorable conditions. The department filed its case against his citizenship on September 30 in the Southern District of California.
Who Else Is on the List
The 40 people range in age from 26 to 76 and come from about 20 countries, including nine from Mexico and four from Pakistan. Cases named by the department include:
- Ping Li, 61, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to acting as an agent of the Chinese government without telling the attorney general. The department says he worked at the direction of China’s Ministry of State Security, its main spy agency.
- Javier Marrero-Pando, 60, a Cuban native in Georgia who pleaded guilty to aggravated sodomy of a special-needs man. Officials say he swore at his citizenship interview that he had never committed a crime he was not arrested for.
- Norma Esparza, who the department says committed voluntary manslaughter before she became a citizen and hid it.
- Ralph Nabavi, 69, an Iranian native in Miami who pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2019.
- Ahmad Bahar Khattak, 69, a Pakistani native accused of hiding another name and an old order barring him from the country.
Other complaints accuse people of using stolen identities, hiding past deportation orders, marriage fraud and passport fraud.
A Sharp Rise From Past Years
For decades this kind of case was rare. The government averaged about 11 denaturalization cases a year from 1990 to 2017, according to the Brennan Center, a law and policy institute. In June 2025, the department’s Civil Division told its lawyers to pursue these cases hard wherever the law and evidence allow.
By August 3, the department had filed 123 such complaints since President Trump took office in January 2025. It filed 24 during the four years of the Biden administration and 102 across Mr. Trump’s first term. The 40 new cases come on top of the 123.
What Has to Happen in Court
No one on the list has lost citizenship yet. These are civil cases, meaning they are lawsuits decided by a judge, not criminal trials with a jury. The department must prove its case, and each person can fight it.
The bar is high. In a 2017 case, Maslenjak v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that a lie or hidden fact must have played a role in the person getting citizenship. Daniel Kanstroom, an immigration law scholar, has said “the protections in place for people facing denaturalization are pretty robust.” Human rights groups warn that a wider use of these cases could leave some people stateless, meaning a citizen of no country at all.
Only people who became citizens later in life can lose citizenship this way. Americans born in the United States cannot.
What Comes Next
Each of the 40 cases now moves through federal court one at a time. Shumate said the department intends to keep pursuing what he called its “largest denaturalization effort in history.” For Americans who want immigration law enforced, the message from the department is that lying on a citizenship application can catch up with a person years later.
Sources:
newsweek.com, aljazeera.com, theweek.com, latintimes.com, nationpress.com, thehill.com, yahoo.com
