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U.S. Immigration Officials Create De-Naturalization Task Force

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests we are going to be discussing denaturalization in the context of United States Immigration with specific emphasis on recent news reports that I have read regarding this phenomenon, or this matter I guess I should say.

AP News, apnews.com. AP News Break:  “US Launches Bid to Find Citizenship Cheaters” -That's the head line. Published June 12th 2018, by Amy Taxin. Quoting directly. Los Angeles: "The US Government Agency that oversees immigration is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it. US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press at an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and Immigration Officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization." Quoting further, "we finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place” Cissna said. “What we are looking at when you boil it all down is potentially a few thousand cases.”  

So to be clear we are not talking about very many people in the grand scheme of the overall immigration system. But that being said I think this is a very good signal of the underlying paradigm of the current Administration with respect to Immigration matters as well as the lengths to which they'll go to pursue policy initiatives associated with immigration. This Administration is very strict with respect to immigration.  Regulatorily they are, well I should say administratively they are processing cases in a rather, for lack of a better term "by the book" manner and now it is increasingly clear that they are going to be using their enforcement functions to go ahead and try to find people who are in violation of US Immigration Law. In fact I find it rather interesting. There are some parallels between steps being taken in the US immigration system as well as steps being taken in the Thai Immigration system to go ahead and deal with matters associated with immigration enforcement. Not getting into some of the more politicized facts of the day with respect to US Immigration, I think this is actually as important if not more important than some of the discussions with respect to the detentions at the border etc. because we are talking about folks that have gone through the naturalization process and they are going to be investigated and if found to have engaged in the process fraudulently, can be denaturalized and the denaturalization process is not something that is talked about very often with respect to US immigration law but it is something that exists. If one stipulates a material misrepresentation of fact at any point in the immigration proceedings associated with them, visa applications, later renewal applications, adjustment of status applications, subsequent naturalization applications, these misstatements, these material misrepresentations can later come back to haunt an individual even if they think they have crossed the Finish Line in getting their US Citizenship and it is clear at least in this Administration, there are going to be resources and time devoted to searching out these individuals and in some cases it looks like denaturalizing them and presumably deporting them back to their country of origin.