DENATURALIZATION PROCEEDINGS USUALLY target false statements made by applicants on the forms they must fill out as part of their naturalization requirements, and those false statements aren’t always material to the application’s approval. That, however, won’t stop the government from pursuing charges on the basis of those false statements.
“What the government wanted was for any lie or misrepresentation to be enough to denaturalize you,” said immigration attorney Kathrin Mautino. Mautino, who runs her own specialized law firm in San Diego, California, said, “If they could prove you lied about anything, that could be enough.”
Pursuing immigration fraud isn’t new. The use of denaturalization as a tactic, however, wasn’t given much attention before September 11, 2001. After the terror attacks, said Smith, “the government began looking at and re-evaluating any and all tactics from a national security strategy.” One component was denaturalization, a tactic that has been used aggressively over the past two decades.
That changed for naturalized citizens in criminal cases when the Supreme Court, in June 2017, ruled that a simple misstatement on naturalization paperwork was, in and of itself, not enough to strip citizenship at the criminal level. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, said that the law allows the government to strip “a person of citizenship not when she committed any illegal act during the naturalization process, but only when that act played some role in her naturalization.”
Yet the different standard of proof for civil cases had meant that ICE has merely changed its tactics, not its approach. “The standard is lower on civil cases, so there is more of an emphasis on pursuing those cases,” said Laura Rótolo, an immigration specialist with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Another benefit for the government in civil denaturalization is that in criminal cases, the defendant must be provided an attorney if they cannot afford one; likewise, there is no right to a jury trial in civil cases. The HSI handbook points out that “there is no statute of limitations for bringing a civil denaturalization action.” For criminal denaturalization cases, there is a 10-year statute of limitations.
Stock told The Intercept that civil cases often end with the defendant giving in against the power of the federal government. Contesting the cases can cause a defendant to rack up tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars of legal bills — forcing those without means to capitulate early in the legal process. “The rich and powerful hardly ever get denaturalized,” said Stock.
Once someone is convicted and stripped of their citizenship in civil proceedings, they revert back to their original status, usually a permanent resident. Then, depending on the circumstances, the individual is deportable. However, Texas lawyer Curtright said, “It’s not automatic.”
ICE MAKES CLEAR that it hopes to keep the contents of the handbook under wraps. The opening of the booklet states clearly that if the rules of denaturalization investigations are requested in court discovery, agents should consult with internal legal counsel before revealing the inner workings of the agency to stop their exposure.
“If disclosure of this Handbook or any portion of it is demanded in any judicial or administrative proceeding,” the foreword reads, various authorities within ICE for legal and public affairs proceedings “should be consulted so that appropriate measures can be taken to invoke privileges against disclosure.”
That seems wrong to the ACLU’s Rótolo, who pointed out that the internal nature of the document doesn’t justify keeping the contents away from public view. “In general, handbooks are subject to the Freedom of Information Act,” Rótolo said. “Just because it’s internal doesn’t mean it’s not subject to the law.”
Bourke, the ICE spokesperson, told The Intercept that, generally speaking, there was nothing unusual about keeping information like that in the handbook secret. “It’s not unusual for an internal training document like this to be considered law-enforcement sensitive,” Bourke said in an email, “and therefore, not publicly available.”
The level of secrecy isn’t a surprise to Mautino, the San Diego attorney, who said that it’s typical of the federal government to hold back information from defense attorneys in all manners of immigration cases. “It’s typical of the government holding all the cards and not telling you what you’re looking at,” said Mautino. “We see this all the time.”
Mautino said that the information in the handbook could be helpful for defendants and their lawyers. Instead, most of the time immigration lawyers are flying blind in court and up against a bureaucratic institution that won’t tell them anything. “They ask questions that seem to come out of the blue; we have no idea where they come from,” said Mautino. “Our cases will be stuck and we’ll have no idea why.”
Stock believes that the information in the handbook should be public, especially the information that deals with civil denaturalization. It’s a civil procedure, she explained, and so claims for secrecy and security don’t ring as true as they might in criminal cases. And it’s the government — not some private corporation. Stock said, “They need to be open and transparent about why they’re doing things.”
How ICE Works to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Americans
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