Congress Pushes Plan to Revoke Citizenship on a Historic Scale

Interior view of an empty courtroom with wooden furniture and American flags

A new push in Congress could let Washington strip both birthright and naturalized citizenship on a scale the country has never seen before.

Story Snapshot

Rep. Andy Ogles’ “Remigration Act” links denaturalization to Trump’s wider effort to narrow who counts as an American.
Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship and a DOJ memo have opened major legal fights over the 14th Amendment.
Denaturalization cases are rising fast after more than a century of being used only in extreme situations.
Both conservatives and liberals worry the government is turning citizenship into a political weapon instead of a stable right.

What Rep. Andy Ogles Is Proposing

Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles has introduced a draft “Remigration Act” that would sharply change who can keep American citizenship. The bill would revoke naturalized citizenship from people convicted of aggravated felonies, government-benefits fraud, certain federal crimes, or giving material support to foreign terrorist groups within ten years of becoming citizens. It would also end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and tighten English-language rules for new citizens by requiring a standardized literacy test.

Ogles’ bill goes beyond crime. It orders the Department of Homeland Security to review every asylum grant, refugee admission, and status adjustment approved during the Biden years. Supporters say this is about fixing “citizenship cheaters” and cleaning up fraud. Critics see a sweeping review aimed at undoing an entire prior administration’s work. Both sides read it as proof that those in Washington care more about scoring points in old immigration wars than giving families a stable path to the American Dream.

Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Changes the Ground Rules

On his first day of the current term, President Trump signed Executive Order 14160, telling agencies not to treat some babies born on U.S. soil as citizens. Under the order, a child born here does not automatically qualify if the mother was here unlawfully, or lawfully but only temporarily on a visa, and the father was not a citizen or permanent resident. The policy applies only to future births, thirty days after the order, but it has thrown long-settled ideas about the 14th Amendment into doubt.

The order is on hold while the Supreme Court reviews whether it is constitutional. Legal scholars at Harvard and civil rights groups argue the Constitution’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” has always included children of immigrants, no matter their parents’ status, backed by the 1898 case Wong Kim Ark. They also say a president does not have the power to narrow citizenship by executive order. That fight matters because if the Court approves Trump’s order, a birth certificate alone may no longer prove citizenship, and millions of children could be stuck in limbo.

How Denaturalization Went From Rare Tool to Growing Campaign

For most of the last century, denaturalization was used rarely and mainly for extreme cases such as Nazis, war criminals, or terrorists. Between 1990 and 2017, the Department of Justice filed only 305 denaturalization cases, about eleven per year. Even during Trump’s first term, the average rose only to forty-two cases per year. Advocates on both left and right saw citizenship as something the government stripped only in the most severe situations.

That pattern has shifted. A June 11, 2025 Justice Department memo made denaturalization one of the civil division’s top five enforcement priorities and appears to expand which cases can be targeted. Researchers have found that in recent years the government has built up new offices and data tools to find cases, and the current administration has filed about twice as many denaturalization suits in each of its first two years as the prior twelve-year average. In May 2026 alone, the Department of Justice filed fifteen civil denaturalization complaints, far above historic monthly norms.

Ogles, Trump, and DOJ: A Three‑Track Assault on Citizenship Rules

Trump has told audiences his administration will revoke the citizenship of naturalized immigrants convicted of defrauding Americans, tying denaturalization to an anti-fraud message many voters support. Representative Ogles echoes that line, calling on television for denaturalization and deportation of people who are here illegally and commit crimes. At the same time, the Department of Justice has filed a civil case to strip citizenship from Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, who is accused of running a multimillion-dollar identity theft and tax fraud scheme.

These examples give the campaign a face: a big fraud case, a tough-on-crime message, and a bill promising to close loopholes. But civil rights lawyers point out that civil denaturalization cases do not give defendants a right to court-appointed lawyers and use a lower burden of proof than criminal trials. They also warn that the June 2025 memo lets prosecutors treat crimes committed after naturalization as proof of earlier fraud, even though the Supreme Court’s Maslenjak decision says misstatements must be material to getting citizenship in the first place.

Shared Fears: Is Citizenship Becoming a Political Weapon?

People on the right who are angry about illegal immigration and government fraud see real problems, and cases like Kazeem’s show fraud can be serious and costly. Many ask why scammers should keep citizenship while hardworking families struggle with high prices and a government that rarely punishes elite lawbreakers. For them, Ogles’ bill and Trump’s order look like long overdue action after decades of weakness on border security and enforcement.

People on the left see the same system from another angle. They point to history showing denaturalization often grows fastest when leaders feel political pressure and then gets checked by the courts. They worry new rules will sweep up people who made minor mistakes on forms or simply have the wrong parents’ status, making them “second-class citizens” whose rights depend on who holds power in Washington. Across the spectrum, a deeper fear is taking hold: that the rich and powerful can now change even the meaning of citizenship itself, while ordinary Americans live every day wondering if the government still works for them.