Trump Administration Moves to Ramp Up Citizenship Revocations for Foreign-Born Americans, Targets Hit Triple Digits Monthly

The Trump administration’s drive to revoke citizenship from Americans born abroad reverberates well beyond the letter of the law, unsettling New York’s immigrant roots and national legal norms alike.

For a city that claims nearly 3 million foreign-born residents, the notion that U.S. citizenship might hang by a thread—for some, even after years or decades of lawful status—would once have seemed fanciful. Yet, as the Trump administration accelerates its campaign to scrutinise and, where possible, rescind the citizenship of Americans born overseas, New Yorkers may have cause to re-examine their sense of permanence. According to NBC News, federal officials are now targeting 100 to 200 potential denaturalisation cases per month, including among the typically unremarkable ranks of those born abroad to U.S. citizen parents.

The drive is part of a broader toolkit that includes mass visa revocations and a sharp uptick in deportations on the government’s watch. Newly public data show that, in the first year of President Trump’s second term, the federal government cancelled more than 85,000 visas—a figure more than double the prior year—while spending some $40m deporting approximately 300 immigrants to “third countries.” For those born overseas yet holding U.S. citizenship, attention has long focused on laws requiring at least one parent with citizenship (and a stipulated period of physical presence in the United States), but these tests had rarely been wielded as weapons.

So what has changed? The answer lies less in new statutes than in shifting priorities: Joseph Edlow, who leads U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has reportedly dispatched experts to trawl through thousands of files nationwide to identify technical errors, omissions or potential misrepresentations that could, with enough diligence, be grounds for denaturalisation. As per the Justice Department, the Trump administration initiated 102 such cases in its first four years; now, the target rate is measured in the hundreds per month.

The local fallout is not hard to imagine. Nowhere in the nation houses as many dual citizens, or children born abroad who acquired citizenship by descent, as New York City. Many serve as links in the city’s formidable ecosystem—doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs—hardly the sort to inspire government suspicion. Yet, increasingly, families and immigration lawyers report a “chilling effect,” with some U.S. passport holders quietly apprehensive that a bureaucratic mishap or long-forgotten paperwork error could upend their lives.

This insecurity has concrete consequences. For one, legal clinics and advocacy groups, already stretched by years of tighter federal enforcement, now face a new stream of inquiries: Can one’s citizenship really be stripped decades after the fact? Does a minor infraction—say, an administrative error on a parent’s naturalisation form—portend trouble? Such questions, which once belonged to the realm of legal arcana, now rank among the top anxieties on New York’s consular circuits.

The economic ripples are not trivial. By some estimates, immigrants and their American-born children account for over 30% of New York’s workforce and power a panoply of small businesses. The spectre of citizenship insecurity is unlikely to buoy confidence in long-term investments, particularly among families weighing moves to the city or the return of highly skilled expatriates. It certainly does little to clarify New York’s brand as the “open city” in America’s narrative—or the United States’ reputation as a steadfast rule-of-law jurisdiction.

Politically, the development may prove a double-edged sword. Polls suggest that hardening attitudes on citizenship—especially the spectacle of stripping Americans of their legal status—are playing well with elements of the GOP base far from the coasts. Yet in a city where more than a third of all residents are foreign-born, the effort threatens to deepen the estrangement between the White House and its largest metropolis. The partisan complexion of denaturalisation cases, and the allocation of resources to hunt for them, have prompted New York’s congressional delegation (and the city’s mayor) to denounce what they call a campaign of “legal attrition.”

A national comparison is instructive. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s government has recently ramped up revocations under its Nationality and Borders Act, though not with anything approaching the American scale or media noise. In most developed countries—including Canada and Germany—citizenship revocation remains exceedingly rare, generally reserved for the gravest cases of fraud or national security threat. The notion of a monthly quota, let alone mass document reviews, would be considered draconian by comparison.

A fraught precedent, and a shadow on permanence

The longer-term implications could be weighty. The American tradition—however imperfect—has long treated citizenship acquired at birth as sacrosanct, disrupted only for acts of morally serious deception. By treating administrative errors or paperwork anomalies as plausible grounds for denaturalisation, the government risks moving the goalposts in ways that bode ill not just for new arrivals, but for the settled fabric of civic life. At the margins, any sign that America’s promise can be rescinded by file-review will prick the sense of security that undergirds a healthy democracy.

Of course, defenders of the programme frame it as a matter of fairness and legal hygiene: citizenship, they argue, should be reserved for those who met the requirements honestly, and not extended indefinitely to the fraudulent. And a review or two hardly presages a wholesale denaturalisation campaign. Still, the sheer scale of the new push—hundreds of reviews monthly—looks less like targeted clean-up and more like policy by intimidation.

For a federal government to spending $40m to deport just 300 people—a figure paltry when measured against national budgets—seems an inefficient use of resources, especially when hundreds of thousands of legitimate applications languish for years. More galling for New Yorkers is the idea that city-bound personnel and expertise will be diverted from processing new arrivals or resolving backlogs to trawl for long-ago errors among naturalised citizens.

It is tempting to ascribe this to politics alone. But in practice, the development sets a precedent with the potential to outlast the electoral fortunes of the Trump camp. The legal scaffolding built now—of retroactive scrutiny and ever more conditional citizenship—may tempt future governments to test the limits for other classes of Americans, citizens by birth or not.

In all, the expansion of citizenship revocation rests on a brittle logic: that technical perfection, not good faith, should govern the conferral of belonging. New Yorkers, who know full well the promise and the perils of immigrant renewal, would be right to worry that the line between resident and citizen is becoming less bright, and ever more conditional on the whims of Washington. One suspects few will sleep more soundly for the effort. ■