“Requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years,” said one former immigration official, “turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty.”
A US Border Patrol agent stops a contractor loading his work van and requests to see proof of citizenship on November 6, 2025 in Chicago.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Julia Conley
Dec 18, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Policy experts were skeptical Wednesday that the Trump administration could legally or practically carry out its threat to strip more naturalized Americans of their citizenship. Still, they warned that new guidance issued by the White House to immigration officials would ramp up “fear and terror” in immigrant communities and could portend the targeting of naturalized citizens who President Donald Trump views as adversaries.
The guidance was issued Tuesday to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices, with officers directed to supply the Department of Justice (DOJ) with “100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year.
Trump Deportation Push Continues With TSA-ICE Partnership and Move to Strip Legal Status
The denaturalization process is “deliberately hard” for the federal government, noted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and stripping people of the citizenship is a rare step only taken in cases of fraud when they applied to be a citizen or in other narrow circumstances.
As such, between 2017-25, there have been just over 120 denaturalization cases filed with the Office of Immigration Litigation at the DOJ.
Under the first Trump administration, denaturalization cases peaked at 90 in one year in 2018, and the directive issued Tuesday signaled the White House is aiming for a far bigger escalation as it also continues its mass deportation operation and blocks people from seeking asylum as they are permitted to under international law.
Reichlin-Melnick called the directive for a denaturalization quota “vicious and cruel,” and pointed out that the president is asking USCIS and the DOJ to take on an onerous task.
“These cases are hard to file and win, and require a lot of DOJ resources, and the DOJ is stretched thin already. So we’ll see; I have serious doubts about their ability to do this,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
USCIS refers cases to the DOJ, which must prove in a federal court that it has “unequivocal evidence” that someone obtained their citizenship illegally or fraudulently.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that citizenship and naturalization are too precious and fundamental to our democracy for the government to take it away on their whim. Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, USCIS should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated,” Amanda Baran, a former senior USCIS official who served during the Biden administration, told the New York Times.
Naturalized Americans account for 26 million people in the US, with 800,000 people sworn in last year. In most cases, a person who loses their citizenship status is classified as a legal permanent resident.
Trump has repeatedly called to denaturalize Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and to deport her over her criticism of his policies, and has made the same threat against New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.
In those threatened cases, wrote Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, earlier this month, “it appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty.”
“Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more ‘American’ is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable,” wrote Waldman. “We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out.”
Three other Brennan Center experts also recently wrote about the history of denaturalization efforts in the US, including during the “Red Scare” of the 1950s:
Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
“This is straight-up Nazi stuff and I’m calling on my fellow Jewish Americans who know where this can lead to be in the vanguard against it,” said Dylan Willams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, also noting that the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee has endorsed Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for the denaturalization and expulsion of Muslim Americans and immigrants.
Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS official, told the Times that Trump’s quota for denaturalization cases “risks politicizing citizenship revocation” as it has been in the past.
“And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years,” she said, “turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”
Rights Group Condemns ‘Terror’ and ‘Lawlessness’ Spread by Trump’s Masked Thugs
“Allowing masked, unidentified agents to roam communities and apprehend people without identifying themselves erodes trusts in the rule of law and creates a dangerous vacuum where abuses can flourish.”
Federal agents drag a man away after his hearing at the immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on July 24, 2025.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Dec 18, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
As masked government agents—an oft-employed terror tool of authoritarian regimes—run roughshod amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, a leading human rights group on Thursday called on Congress to investigate abuses perpetrated by federal officers against immigrants and US citizens alike.
Federal immigration enforcement agents “now commonly operate masked and without visible identification, compounding the abusive and unaccountable nature of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. “The indefinite and widespread nature of these practices is fundamentally inconsistent with the United States’ obligations to ensure that law enforcement abuses are investigated and met with accountability.”
Report Tracks Trump ‘War on Free Speech’ and Urges Systemic Resistance
HRW continued:
Since President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, his administration has carried out an abusive campaign of immigration raids and arrests, primarily of people of color, across the country. Many of the raids target places where Latino people work, shop, eat, and live. The agents have seized people in courthouses and at regularly scheduled appointments with immigration officials, as well as in places of worship, schools, and other sensitive locations. Many raids have been marked by the sudden and unprovoked use of force without any justification, creating a climate of fear in many immigrant communities.
Drawing upon interviews with 18 people who were arrested or witnessed arrests by unidentified federal agents, HRW highlighted the “terror” and helplessness felt by victims of such “lawlessness.”
“It was a horrible feeling,” said Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University who was illegally snatched off a Massachusetts street in March and whisked off to an US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lockup in Louisiana after she published an opinion piece in a student newspaper advocating divestment from apartheid Israel as it waged a genocidal war on Gaza. With Öztürk having committed no crime, a federal judge ordered her release 45 days later.
“I didn’t think that they were the police because I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” Öztürk said of her arrest—which bystanders likened to a kidnapping. “I thought they were people who were doxing me, and I was genuinely very afraid for my safety... As a woman who’s traveled and lived alone in various countries for my studies, I’ve never experienced intense fear for my safety—until that moment.”
Operatives with ICE—part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—and other agencies have violently attacked not only unauthorized immigrants but also members of their communities including US citizens, activists, journalists, and others. The agents are often wearing masks but not badges or other identifiers, making it very difficult to hold abusers accountable.
While ICE tries to justify its widespread practice of masking agents “to prevent doxing,” HRW stressed that “this kind of generalized, blanket justification for concealing officers’ identity is not compatible with US human rights obligations, except when necessary and proportionate to address particular safety concerns.”
“Anonymity also weakens deterrence, fosters conditions for impunity, and chills the exercise of rights,” the group added.
It also sows terror, as Republican-appointed US District Judge William Young noted in a ruling earlier this year: “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters.”
HRW also noted that “in recent months, media outlets have reported on people posing as federal agents kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and extorting victims, exploiting fears of immigration enforcement.”
“Allowing masked, unidentified agents to roam communities and apprehend people without identifying themselves erodes trusts in the rule of law and creates a dangerous vacuum where abuses can flourish, exacerbating the unnecessary violence and brutality of the arrests,” HRW associate crisis and conflict director Belkis Wille said in a statement Thursday.
HRW called on Congress to “investigate the brutality of the ongoing immigration enforcement activities, including the specific impacts of unidentifiable agents carrying out stops and arrests on impeding investigations and accountability efforts.”
In addition to efforts by state legislatures to unmask federal agents, congressional Democrats have demanded ICE and other officers identify themselves, and have introduced legislation—the No Secret Police Act and No Masks for ICE Act in the House and VISIBLE Act in the Senate—that would compel them to do so.
“If you uphold the peace of a democratic society, you should not be anonymous,” No Secret Police Act lead co-sponsor Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) said at the time of the bill’s introduction in June. “DHS and ICE agents wearing masks and hiding identification echoes the tactics of secret police authoritarian regimes—and deviates from the practices of local law enforcement, which contributes to confusion in communities.”
“Allowing masked, unidentified agents to roam communities and apprehend people without identifying themselves erodes trusts in the rule of law and creates a dangerous vacuum where abuses can flourish.”
Federal agents drag a man away after his hearing at the immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on July 24, 2025.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Dec 18, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
As masked government agents—an oft-employed terror tool of authoritarian regimes—run roughshod amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, a leading human rights group on Thursday called on Congress to investigate abuses perpetrated by federal officers against immigrants and US citizens alike.
Federal immigration enforcement agents “now commonly operate masked and without visible identification, compounding the abusive and unaccountable nature of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. “The indefinite and widespread nature of these practices is fundamentally inconsistent with the United States’ obligations to ensure that law enforcement abuses are investigated and met with accountability.”
Report Tracks Trump ‘War on Free Speech’ and Urges Systemic Resistance
HRW continued:
Since President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, his administration has carried out an abusive campaign of immigration raids and arrests, primarily of people of color, across the country. Many of the raids target places where Latino people work, shop, eat, and live. The agents have seized people in courthouses and at regularly scheduled appointments with immigration officials, as well as in places of worship, schools, and other sensitive locations. Many raids have been marked by the sudden and unprovoked use of force without any justification, creating a climate of fear in many immigrant communities.
Drawing upon interviews with 18 people who were arrested or witnessed arrests by unidentified federal agents, HRW highlighted the “terror” and helplessness felt by victims of such “lawlessness.”
“It was a horrible feeling,” said Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University who was illegally snatched off a Massachusetts street in March and whisked off to an US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lockup in Louisiana after she published an opinion piece in a student newspaper advocating divestment from apartheid Israel as it waged a genocidal war on Gaza. With Öztürk having committed no crime, a federal judge ordered her release 45 days later.
“I didn’t think that they were the police because I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” Öztürk said of her arrest—which bystanders likened to a kidnapping. “I thought they were people who were doxing me, and I was genuinely very afraid for my safety... As a woman who’s traveled and lived alone in various countries for my studies, I’ve never experienced intense fear for my safety—until that moment.”
Operatives with ICE—part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—and other agencies have violently attacked not only unauthorized immigrants but also members of their communities including US citizens, activists, journalists, and others. The agents are often wearing masks but not badges or other identifiers, making it very difficult to hold abusers accountable.
While ICE tries to justify its widespread practice of masking agents “to prevent doxing,” HRW stressed that “this kind of generalized, blanket justification for concealing officers’ identity is not compatible with US human rights obligations, except when necessary and proportionate to address particular safety concerns.”
“Anonymity also weakens deterrence, fosters conditions for impunity, and chills the exercise of rights,” the group added.
It also sows terror, as Republican-appointed US District Judge William Young noted in a ruling earlier this year: “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters.”
HRW also noted that “in recent months, media outlets have reported on people posing as federal agents kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and extorting victims, exploiting fears of immigration enforcement.”
“Allowing masked, unidentified agents to roam communities and apprehend people without identifying themselves erodes trusts in the rule of law and creates a dangerous vacuum where abuses can flourish, exacerbating the unnecessary violence and brutality of the arrests,” HRW associate crisis and conflict director Belkis Wille said in a statement Thursday.
HRW called on Congress to “investigate the brutality of the ongoing immigration enforcement activities, including the specific impacts of unidentifiable agents carrying out stops and arrests on impeding investigations and accountability efforts.”
In addition to efforts by state legislatures to unmask federal agents, congressional Democrats have demanded ICE and other officers identify themselves, and have introduced legislation—the No Secret Police Act and No Masks for ICE Act in the House and VISIBLE Act in the Senate—that would compel them to do so.
“If you uphold the peace of a democratic society, you should not be anonymous,” No Secret Police Act lead co-sponsor Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) said at the time of the bill’s introduction in June. “DHS and ICE agents wearing masks and hiding identification echoes the tactics of secret police authoritarian regimes—and deviates from the practices of local law enforcement, which contributes to confusion in communities.”
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