The Department of Justice filed civil denaturalization cases against 17 naturalized immigrants, targeting individuals the government says lied their way through the citizenship process while committing serious crimes, from health care fraud and stock manipulation to child sexual abuse and drug-money laundering. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin framed the actions as a direct message: American citizenship, once obtained through deception, can be taken back.
The cases, detailed in a DOJ announcement, span a range of criminal conduct that the government says occurred during or before the naturalization process. Federal law allows the revocation of citizenship when applicants committed deception while seeking it, though it does not permit denaturalization for crimes committed after the process is complete.
That legal distinction matters. Every one of these 17 cases rests on the allegation that the individual was dishonest during the multi-year, multi-stage citizenship process itself. The government's theory is straightforward: if you hid crimes or lied on your application, you never legitimately earned the privilege of citizenship in the first place.
The individual case summaries released by the Justice Department read like a catalog of the immigration system's worst failures, people who slipped through while actively breaking the law.
Leidys Delmas Garcia, a 54-year-old native of Cuba, admitted in criminal proceedings that she and co-conspirators established and operated 30 physical therapy clinics in Florida. Those clinics, the DOJ says, fraudulently billed Blue Cross Blue Shield roughly $36.7 million for services that were either not medically necessary or never provided at all. The government now seeks to revoke her naturalization.
Jean Claude Alfred, a 68-year-old native of Haiti who became a citizen in 1994, faces denaturalization over allegations that beginning in September 1993, approximately one month before he filed his naturalization application, he repeatedly sexually abused his minor daughter. That conduct, the government says, continued during the pendency of his naturalization proceedings.
Andrea Marroquin, a 44-year-old native of Colombia, is described in DOJ filings as the daughter of a major Colombian drug trafficker who inherited his money when he died. The government alleges she obtained permanent residence by concealing a bigamous marriage to a U.S. citizen and then, between 2003 and 2011, conspired to engage in wire and bank fraud and money laundering using her late father's drug money to finance fraudulent real estate transactions in Miami.
The Justice Department under Todd Blanche has made clear it intends to pursue these cases aggressively.
Talman Harris, a 49-year-old native of Jamaica, allegedly conspired over an eight-year period, including during his 2012, 2014 naturalization proceedings, to manipulate the price and volume of shares in publicly traded companies. The scheme, the DOJ says, caused more than $54 million to be invested in artificially controlled shares, with investors ultimately losing approximately $39 million.
Neeraj Sharma, a 50-year-old native of India, served as owner and CEO of Magnavision LLC, a staffing company in New Jersey. The government alleges he signed and filed eleven fraudulent H-1B visa petitions with USCIS, exploiting the very immigration system that had given him a path to citizenship.
Rodger George Gurdon, a 55-year-old native of Jamaica who naturalized in 2011, allegedly engaged in a conspiracy to steal and resell medical products from military hospitals operated by the Department of Defense. The government says this conduct occurred before he became a citizen.
Abdikadir Ali Kadiye, a 54-year-old native of Somalia, drew a civil denaturalization complaint filed on June 3, 2026, in the District of Minnesota by the DOJ and the U.S. Attorney for that district. The government alleges that beginning in April 1997, Kadiye sought admission to the United States by filing applications under two separate identities.
Ronnie Price, a 40-year-old native of Trinidad and Tobago, naturalized in 2016. Before that, at age 30, he had sexual intercourse with a female under 16, a statutory rape crime to which he eventually pleaded guilty. During his naturalization proceedings, the DOJ says, Price claimed he had never committed a crime for which he had not been arrested, falsely testified to the same, and concealed facts that would have uncovered his criminal activity.
Milagros Marileisis Acosta Torres, a 40-year-old native of Cuba, was allegedly part of a conspiracy to defraud a tribal casino in Florida before she naturalized. Her husband and several others stole millions of dollars from the casino by creating false credit vouchers.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the initiative in terms that left little room for ambiguity, as laid out in the DOJ's official statement:
"Gaining U.S. citizenship is a privilege and under the steadfast leadership of President Trump, this Department of Justice maintains a zero-tolerance policy for the abuse of this process."
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin matched that tone:
"American citizenship is a privilege, and it must be earned honestly. If you come here, break our laws, and lie in your immigration proceedings, you forfeit that privilege."
The language is deliberate. Both officials used the word "privilege", a pointed contrast with the progressive framing that treats citizenship as something closer to an entitlement once conferred. The administration is making the case that citizenship carries ongoing obligations of honesty, and that fraud at the front door voids the entire transaction.
The broader enforcement posture fits a pattern. DHS officials are also raising the standard of behavior expected before naturalization and increasing the difficulty of passing the citizenship test, steps that signal a tightening of the pipeline well before the denaturalization stage.
That tightening extends across the administration's immigration enforcement agenda, which has faced legal challenges but continues to expand in scope.
Not everyone sees the 17 cases as a meaningful shift. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a pro-migration advocate with the American Immigration Council, argued on Twitter that the numbers remain marginal:
"The expansion of denaturalization remains very small in scale. 17 people is a significant increase from historical efforts, true, but represents around 0.00006% of the total naturalized population."
That framing is technically accurate, and entirely beside the point. The question is not whether 17 cases will transform the naturalized population overnight. The question is whether the federal government will enforce the rules it already has on the books. For decades, denaturalization was treated as a near-dead letter, a tool too politically sensitive to wield. The result was a system where fraud at the naturalization stage carried almost no long-term risk.
Reichlin-Melnick's percentage argument also obscures the nature of the cases. These are not borderline disputes over paperwork errors. The DOJ's filings describe child sexual abuse, tens of millions in health care fraud, stock manipulation that wiped out investors, drug-money laundering, identity fraud, and theft from military hospitals. If the immigration system cannot claw back citizenship from people like these, the system has no teeth at all.
The Justice Department's willingness to pursue aggressive legal action in other arenas suggests this is not a one-off gesture but part of a broader enforcement philosophy.
What these cases expose is not just individual wrongdoing. They expose a naturalization pipeline that failed at every checkpoint. Jean Claude Alfred was sexually abusing his daughter while his citizenship application was pending, and nobody caught it. Talman Harris was running a stock manipulation scheme during his naturalization proceedings. Abdikadir Ali Kadiye filed under two separate identities starting in 1997 and apparently got away with it long enough to become a citizen.
The naturalization process can be completed as soon as five years after winning a green card. That timeline is supposed to include background checks, interviews, and sworn testimony. In case after case here, the system accepted applicants at face value while they were actively engaged in serious criminal conduct.
That failure belongs to the bureaucracy, to USCIS, to the agencies that ran the background checks, to the adjudicators who signed off. The denaturalization tool exists precisely because the front-end screening is imperfect. Using it is not an abuse of power. It is a correction.
The administration's broader push to raise standards for naturalization and strengthen the Justice Department's enforcement capacity reflects a recognition that the front end needs work, too.
The DOJ's announcement covers nine of the 17 cases in detail. The remaining eight have not been fully described in available materials. The specific statutory provisions invoked in the filings, the court districts receiving each case, and the docket numbers have not all been disclosed publicly.
It also remains to be seen how courts will handle these cases. Denaturalization is a civil process, but it carries enormous consequences, effectively rendering someone stateless or subject to deportation. Courts have historically applied a high evidentiary standard. The government will need to prove its allegations clearly and convincingly in each case.
None of that changes the underlying principle. Citizenship obtained through fraud is citizenship that was never legitimately earned. The people who played by the rules, who disclosed their histories, passed their interviews honestly, and waited years for the privilege, deserve a system that holds cheaters accountable.
If seventeen cases is where it starts, the only real question is why it took this long.