The Trump administration moved Friday to revoke the U.S. citizenship of 12 more immigrants for crimes or alleged lies in their citizenship applications. One is a former Catholic priest in Northern California who admitted to sexually molesting a teenage boy and was sentenced to prison.
“This Department of Justice continues to file denaturalization actions at record speeds to restore integrity in our naturalization process,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in an announcement of the actions. “The disturbing criminal histories confirm these individuals should have never received the privilege of U.S. citizenship.”
It is also another step in President Donald Trump’s program of “mass deportations” of immigrants who allegedly entered the United States illegally. Federal courts have rejected most of his efforts, including plans to hold migrants without bail during deportation proceedings, an attempted shutdown of the U.S.-Mexican border to immigrants seeking asylum and the swift deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans under a 1798 law, halted by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
“Denaturalization can be seen as part of the mass deportation campaign,” said Kevin Johnson, an immigration law professor at UC Davis. “All in all, the Trump administration seeks to limit legal immigration, remove any relief from removal and remove as many noncitizens as possible.”
Thousands of U.S. immigrants were denaturalized during the first and second World Wars and the early years of the Cold War.
The Supreme Court then issued several rulings restricting the government’s authority to revoke citizenship based on a person’s political views, and the rate of denaturalization fell to an average of 11 cases per year between 1990 and 2017, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. But it more than doubled during Trump’s first term, and increased again when he took office last year.
The 12 on Friday’s Justice Department list included 75-year-old Oscar Pelaez, a native of Colombia, who entered the U.S. in 1992 and became a religious worker in 1993, eventually attaining the priesthood in the Diocese of Stockton. He was granted U.S. citizenship in 2001 and, as part of his citizenship application, denied having committed any previously undisclosed crimes.
But in 2002, Pelaez pleaded no contest to charges of sexually abusing a teenage boy for years while he was a priest at Sacred Heart Church in Turlock (Stanislaus County). He was sentenced to six years in prison, but was released on parole in 2005 while being required to register as a sex offender for life.
Immigrants sponsored by their employer or a close relative who is a U.S. citizen can apply for naturalized citizenship after three to five years of living and working legally in the United States. California has 5.6 million naturalized U.S. citizens, far more than any other state.
In a federal court filing Thursday, Trump’s Justice Department said that because Pelaez, in the years leading up to his citizenship application, committed serious crimes and then lied about them, he “could not establish that he was a person of good moral character” and therefore “was ineligible for naturalization.”
Others on Friday’s denaturalization list included a man accused of murdering two police officers in his native Iraq; another man accused of taking part in the execution of six military officers during a 1994 coup in the African nation of Gambia; a man from Nigeria who allegedly used false names in the 1980s and 1990s to acquire legal status and U.S. citizenship, and a Colombian immigrant who allegedly spied for Cuba while living in the U.S. in the 1970s.