The Department of Justice is setting up a dedicated unit to investigating a specific type of immigration fraud that relates to naturalized citizens who had lied on their applications by leaving out prior criminal convictions.
John Bash, U.S. attorney for the western district of Texas, announced the new unit on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program.
“This new unit addresses exactly the kind of people you were just talking about – people who molest children, terrorists. We’ve stood up a unit of 20-30 attorneys who are going to work civil de-naturalization cases, and what those cases are, is when someone lies in the process of trying to get naturalized to be a citizen, usually about their criminal past, but they nevertheless obtain citizenship, we can then actually go in after the fact and strip them of citizenship so long as a judge agrees,” Bash said. “And we’ve been doing that, we’ve stepped that up 200% in the last three years, but it’s getting to the point where we get enough referrals that it’s time to stand up a standalone unit, and so we have 20-30 lawyers dedicated to bring justice to victims of child molestation and to victims of terrorism, war crimes, and so forth.”
Ingraham then displayed a tweet from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that claimed the Trump administration was going after American citizens and taking away their citizenship.
Bash called the ACLU statement “an outrageous statement that really impugns the integrity of all the career attorneys at DOJ that work on these issues.”
“This is about people that never should have been naturalized, never should have been American citizens in the first case,” Bash said. “I’ll just give you a couple of examples. We denaturalized two Balkans Conflicts war criminals who murdered unarmed civilians in the Balkans Conflict. We denaturalized, in my home state of Texas, a man who was molesting a 7-year-old girl who was a family member and of course didn’t disclose that on his naturalization application. I’d really like for the ACLU or anyone else to confront the actual facts of these cases and explain why someone who has been molesting children and lies about it should not be denaturalized.”
Ingraham then asked Bash if most of those who were being denaturalized through this particular process came from “chain migration,” but Bash said that wasn’t the only way they were able to slip through the process.
“They come all different ways. Some of them are people who might have lied about being a family member, but a lot of people come here as refugees, but then lie about the fact that the very conflict they’re fleeing from – they were the war criminal in that conflict,” Bash said. “And the other thing the ACLU leaves out is we have to prove almost beyond a reasonable doubt to a judge’s satisfaction [that] this person never should have been a U.S. citizen. So, there’s all sorts of procedural protections in place to avoid discrimination or unfair treatment in this process.”
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