A Cuban Spy. A Child-Abusing Priest.
An Al-Qaeda Bomb Plotter.
All Naturalized U.S. Citizens.
The DOJ Wants to Take It Back.
On May 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice filed civil denaturalization complaints in federal district courts across the country against 12 naturalized U.S. citizens— among them a former U.S. ambassador convicted of spying for Cuba for more than 40 years, a Catholic priest convicted on 13 counts of sexually abusing a minor, an admitted al-Shabaab member, an alleged al-Qaeda New York Stock Exchange bomb plotter, and a Gambian national accused of executing six military officers.
The legal hook is 8 U.S.C. § 1451, the 1952 statute that allows the government to revoke a naturalization certificate when it was “illegally procured” or “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” In every one of these cases, the DOJ alleges, the defendant lied on Form N-400 about prior criminal conduct, foreign-government affiliation, or true identity — and was later either convicted of the conduct or formally charged with it after taking the oath.
The statute has existed for 74 years. From 1990 to 2017, the United States averaged roughly 11 denaturalizations a year. Twenty-four total were filed during the entire Biden administration. The 12 cases announced last Friday represent a deliberate pivot — documented in a June 11, 2025 memo from Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate — that elevates civil denaturalization to one of the Civil Division’s top five enforcement priorities. Shumate told Newsmax the 12 cases are “a down payment” on hundreds more.
- 12civil denaturalization complaints filedFiled May 8, 2026 by the DOJ Civil Division and various U.S. Attorney’s offices in federal district courts including the Southern District of Florida and District of Arizona — per the DOJ Office of Public Affairs release.
- 8 U.S.C. § 1451the statute they’re being charged underSection 340 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Civil action; preponderance-of-evidence standard for misrepresentation, but Maslenjak v. United States (2017, unanimous) requires the lie to be “material” to the original naturalization decision.
- 11 / yearhistorical denaturalization rate, 1990–2017Per NPR’s review of DOJ data. The Trump 1st-term spike was ~25/year (102 total cases). The Biden administration filed 24 cases in four years. Internal 2025 guidance now targets up to 2,400 referrals annually.
- 9 countriesof origin among the 12 defendantsBolivia/Colombia, Morocco, Somalia, Iraq, Gambia, Uzbekistan, India, China, Nigeria — per ABC News and the DOJ release. Naturalization dates span 1978 (Rocha) through 2017 (Suarez).
- “A down payment”DOJ Civil Division Chief Brett ShumateOn the record to Newsmax, May 8, 2026: the 12 cases are the visible front edge of an enforcement priority that the June 11, 2025 Shumate memo placed in the division’s top five.
1. Victor Manuel Rocha— native of Colombia, naturalized 1978. Former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia (Clinton appointment) and former director of inter-American affairs on the National Security Council. Pleaded guilty in 2024 to acting as an unregistered agent of Cuba; serving a 15-year federal sentence. The DOJ alleges he had been spying for Cuba since 1973 — five years before he naturalized — and concealed that affiliation in his naturalization examination. Seven independent counts filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
2. Oscar Alberto Pelaez— native of Colombia. Catholic priest. Convicted in 2002 on 13 counts including oral copulation and sodomy of a person under 18; victim was abused from age 14 to 17. The DOJ alleges he failed to disclose the conduct in his naturalization application.
3. Khalid Ouazzani— native of Morocco, naturalized 2006. Pleaded guilty to material support to al-Qaeda, bank fraud, and money laundering. The DOJ alleges that after naturalizing he sent tens of thousands of dollars to al-Qaeda, swore bayat (allegiance) to the group in 2008, and worked on a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.
4. Salah Osman Ahmed— Somali-born, naturalized 2007. Pleaded guilty in July 2009 to providing material support to terrorists; admitted to traveling to Somalia and joining al-Shabaab.
5. Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri— native of Iraq. The DOJ alleges leadership in an al-Qaeda affiliate and direct involvement in the assassination of two Iraqi police officers, conduct hidden during admission and naturalization. Civil complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Phoenix.
6. Baboucarr Mboob— native of The Gambia, naturalized 2011. Alleged participation in the extrajudicial execution of six military officers in Gambia — conduct the DOJ classifies as a war crime under the standard the Civil Division uses for human-rights denaturalizations.
7. Abduvosit Razikov— native of Uzbekistan, naturalized 2012. Alleged multiple sham marriages used to obtain immigration status — one of the categories of fraud the Shumate memo singled out.
8. Kevin Robin Suarez— native of Bolivia, naturalized 2017. Convicted in a straw-purchase conspiracy that trafficked firearms from the United States to Latin America.
9. Abdallah Osman Sheikh— Kenyan-born. Convicted of possessing indecent images of minors; received a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. military.
10. Debashis Ghosh— native of India, naturalized 2012. Convicted of a $2.5 million investor-fraud conspiracy and false statements.
11. Pin He (alias Chun Di He)— native of China. Originally ordered removed from the United States in 1992; naturalized in 2013 under a false identity.
12. George Oyakhire (alias Oliver Bennett Oyakhire)— native of Nigeria. Obtained temporary residency and was naturalized in 1996 using a false name and assumed identity, per the DOJ complaint.
“Individuals implicated in committing fraud, heinous crimes such as sexual abuse, or expressing support for terrorism should never have been naturalized as United States citizens.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche · DOJ release, May 8, 2026
Civil denaturalization is not deportation. It is a separate federal civil action under Section 340 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1451, in which the United States sues a naturalized citizen in district court to revoke the naturalization certificate. If the government wins, the person reverts to their pre-naturalization immigration status — from which removal proceedings can then begin.
Two grounds for revocation:(1) the naturalization was “illegally procured” — meaning a statutory eligibility requirement was not met at the time citizenship was granted; or (2) it was “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”
The Maslenjak floor: In Maslenjak v. United States (2017), the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the lie must be “material” — not just any falsehood, but one that would have made an objectively reasonable adjudicator deny the application. Justice Kagan, writing for the Court: a different rule would mean “a single trivial lie” could cost a citizen everything. Maslenjak constrains every one of the 12 cases.
Civil, not criminal: No right to a court-appointed attorney. No jury — a federal judge decides. Defendants who lose can appeal, but lose-rates in civil denaturalization actions historically run high once the underlying criminal conduct is proven.
The downstream consequence: Once denaturalized, the defendant is subject to removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act. For Rocha, that’s a moot point — he has another decade in federal prison. For the others, denaturalization is the lever that opens the door to deportation after their criminal sentences end.
The DOJ’s frame is straightforward: these 12 people should never have been U.S. citizens. The harder question is how they became citizens. The N-400 application asks, under penalty of perjury, whether the applicant has ever associated with a terrorist organization, committed a crime for which they were not arrested, served in a foreign military or intelligence service, or used another name. USCIS officers conduct an in-person examination and a background check that runs FBI fingerprints, watchlists, and prior immigration files.
Operation Janus — the inheritance: Launched late in the Obama administration as a data-matching project after DHS’s Office of Inspector General found that hundreds of immigrants with prior removal orders had been naturalized under different identities because their fingerprints had not been digitized. Janus identified hundreds of thousands of fingerprint records that had never been uploaded; cases like Pin He’s 1992 removal order trace back to that gap.
Operation Second Look — the first Trump term: Janus’s referrals were converted into an active denaturalization program. The first Trump DOJ filed roughly 102 cases over four years — about 25 per year, more than double the historical rate. The Biden administration paused the surge: 24 cases in four years.
Pre-9/11 vetting gaps: Several of the May 8 defendants — Rocha (1978), Oyakhire (1996), Pin He (2013 under a false identity tied to a 1992 removal order) — were naturalized before fingerprint digitization and modern interagency watchlist sharing. Others, like Ouazzani (2006) and Salah Osman Ahmed (2007), were naturalized after 9/11 but before USCIS’s post-2008 tightening of terrorism-related grounds review.
The accountability question: The Shumate memo and the May 8 release frame this as a vetting-failure cleanup spanning multiple administrations — mostly Democratic ones, given the timing — rather than a partisan reach. The strongest cases here pre-date 2009 entirely. The political fight is over what comes next.
The legal authority hasn’t changed since 1952. What changed in June 2025 was the priority list. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate’s Civil Division memo directed line attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” placing the work in the division’s top five enforcement priorities alongside DEI, antisemitism, gender procedures, and sanctuary policies.
1990–2017 baseline: ~11 denaturalization cases per year, federal-court-wide.
Trump first term (2017–2021):~102 cases total, ~25/year — concentrated in Operation Second Look referrals.
Biden (2021–2025):24 cases total. A 2021 executive order directed agencies to ensure denaturalization authority was “not used excessively or inappropriately.”
Trump second term (2025–): Internal USCIS guidance issued in December 2025 directs field offices to refer 100 to 200 denaturalization cases per month — up to 2,400 annually, more than 200 times the 1990–2017 average. The 12 cases announced May 8 are, in Shumate’s own words, “a down payment.”
Harmeet K. Dhillon (R), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, was confirmed April 3, 2025; her division has separately opened an investigation into local prosecutors alleged to discriminate in favor of aliens. The May 8 actions, however, are a Civil Division (not Civil Rights Division) initiative led by AAG Brett A. Shumate, with the Office of the Attorney General signing off — on this announcement, that office was held by Acting AG Todd Blanche, with confirmed AG Pamela Bondi (R) publicly aligned to the priority since her March 26, 2026 remarks.
“This Department continues filing denaturalization actions at record speeds to restore integrity in our naturalization process.”
Brett A. Shumate, Assistant Attorney General · Civil Division · DOJ release, May 8, 2026
Almost no one is arguing the May 8 defendants shouldn’t be denaturalized. The Cuban spy, the child-abusing priest, the al-Shabaab member, and the alleged NYSE bomb plotter are about as defensible a pilot batch as the DOJ could have selected, which is presumably why these 12 were chosen for the public roll-out. The criticism — from the ACLU, former U.S. Attorneys, and immigration scholars — is aimed at the next 2,388 cases.
Naureen Shah, ACLU Equality Division:“It’s another devastating attack by the Trump administration on people who they want to cast as not belonging here. Anyone could be prioritized. It’s really chilling.”
Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney:“The way the memo is written, there is no guarantee DOJ will pursue cases against violent criminals. They could just do easy cases to ratchet up numbers, like we’re seeing with deportation.”
Cassandra Robertson, Case Western law professor: Civil denaturalization cases provide no court-appointed counsel and no jury trial — a federal judge alone decides whether a person loses citizenship. Defendants without resources often face the government unrepresented. Robertson has compared the trajectory to McCarthy-era denaturalizations of citizens deemed “un-American.”
The Mamdani / O’Donnell / Musk problem: The Shumate memo became politically radioactive after the President floated denaturalization or revocation as a tool against political adversaries (NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, comedian Rosie O’Donnell, and at one point Elon Musk). Critics point out that § 1451 is written broadly enough that the same statute used against Rocha and Pelaez could in theory be turned on a naturalized citizen whose only “misrepresentation” is now politically inconvenient. Maslenjak’s materiality requirement is the constitutional brake.
On May 8, 2026, the DOJ used a 1952 statute — rare for 65 years — to file civil complaints against twelve naturalized citizens whose biographies include a Cuban spy, a child-rapist priest, a Stock Exchange bomb plotter, an al-Shabaab member, and a Gambian war-crimes defendant. The legal premise is unimpeachable. The political stakes are what the DOJ does with the next two thousand referrals, and whether Maslenjak’s materiality test holds.
TODAY: Justice Department filed denaturalization actions in various U.S. district courts against 12 individuals accused of serious offenses including: Providing material support to a terrorist group; Committing war crimes; Sexually abusing a minor.
American citizenship is a sacred privilege — not a cheap status that can be obtained dishonestly. Today’s denaturalization actions reflect this Department of Justice’s ongoing efforts to strip citizenship from people who conceal crimes or defraud the American people during the immigration process.
This filing is insane.
President Trump on Truth Social — context for the November 2025 immigration / denaturalization push that immediately preceded the May 8 DOJ action
Trump on Mamdani — the Communist / citizenship rhetoric the May 8 DOJ critics cite as the political backdrop for the broader denaturalization escalation