By Licelle Cobrador
American citizenship is regarded as the “highest hope of civilized men” according to Schneiderman v. United States, 320 U.S. 118, 122 (1943).
U.S. citizenship gained through naturalization is rarely lost. However, it can be stripped away. The government can revoke a naturalized immigrant’s citizenship through a process called “denaturalization” if it was obtained unlawfully or through fraud. This process is essential for enforcing immigration laws, preventing fraud, and protecting public safety and national security.
Background
Efforts to denaturalize individuals who obtained U.S. citizenship wrongfully are not new. The groundwork for these actions began around 2008 when a border official identified a core group of individuals who had bypassed the immigration system. This led to Operation Janus in 2010. The initiative targeted individuals mistakenly naturalized because their older, paper-based fingerprint files had not yet been digitized. By using fake identities or intentionally withholding background information, some individuals successfully reentered the country and obtained citizenship. These system gaps allowed people with criminal histories or prior removal orders to completely bypass background checks.
In September 2016, a Department of Homeland Security/ DHS Office of Inspector General report exposed the true scale of these gaps. It revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement/ ICE had failed to digitize roughly 315,000 fingerprint records. This total included about 148,000 records belonging to fugitives, criminals, and people who had been deported or formally removed from the country. To investigate the remaining breaches, the government subsequently launched Operation Second Look to review hundreds of thousands of additional files.
Under the first Trump administration, the government significantly expanded its capacity to invalidate citizenship by creating a dedicated United States Citizenship and Immigration Services/ USCIS denaturalization task force. In 2018, the agency announced plans to refer over 1,600 cases to the Department of Justice/ DOJ for prosecution. Scaling these operations, a 2019 ICE budget request sought funding to review roughly 700,000 U.S. citizen files under Operation Second Look. Resulting data shows that the largest proportion of these denaturalization cases heavily targeted citizens of Mexican, Haitian, Nigerian, and South Asian descent.
Present Day: Trump 2.0
The current Trump has ordered federal agencies to aggressively pursue these denaturalization proceedings. A major USCIS Policy Manual update in September 2026 standardized protocols under Immigration and Nationality Act/ INA § 340, streamlining how local field offices route suspected fraud directly to ICE and the DOJ. Under this heightened scrutiny, the agency will evaluate all pending and future petitions to determine whether the U.S. citizen petitioner lawfully obtained their own citizenship. This major crackdown specifically focuses on application fraud, marriage fraud, illegal voting, and historical concealment, such as undisclosed criminal records or concealed identities. While the legal standard itself remains unchanged, this highly coordinated system has immediate implications for flagged communities, including Filipino nationals.
Filipinos are affected
The ongoing sweep impacts naturalized citizens from the Philippines. This September, federal prosecutors charged naturalized U.S. Air Force member John Paule Rivera and his aunt, Myra Paule Schulenburg, with immigration fraud. They allegedly used an altered Philippine birth certificate to fake a mother-son relationship, allowing Rivera to receive a green card and fast-track his subsequent military naturalization.
Simultaneously, the government filed a civil denaturalization suit against Jheromell Obejera Arcilla. They allege that Arcilla intentionally hid a major crime—the sexual abuse of a minor—while his application was pending. It disqualified him from meeting the requirement of good moral character.
As of this month, the administration’s campaign pursued Arnel Dacumos Tabafunda and Ramon Navarro. The government seeks to rescind the citizenship of Tabafunda on the grounds that he concealed a history of child sexual abuse during his screening, for which he was later convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. Meanwhile, Navarro faces a civil denaturalization complaint alleging he entered into a sham marriage solely to secure his lawful permanent residency, subsequently lying to immigration authorities to finalize his naturalization.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the evolution of U.S. denaturalization policy—from the technical fingerprint audits of Operation Janus to the aggressive enforcement waves of late 2026—proves that naturalized citizenship remains vulnerable if obtained through deception or legal non-compliance. By standardizing enforcement protocols and launching historic, targeted measures, this administration has transformed a once-rare legal remedy into an active, systemic tool of immigration enforcement.
Atty. Licelle Cobrador of Cobrador & Associates www.cobradorlaw.com can be reached at info@cobradorlaw.com.