Is Denaturalization the Next Front in the Trump Administration’s War on Immigration?

The prosecution of naturalized United States citizens is a sign of a gathering storm.

By Seth Freed Wessler
Dec. 19, 2018

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But then, the knock on the door. The officers were agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a sprawling investigative unit within Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A week earlier, they told Odette, she had been indicted in federal court in Tampa. The Justice Department claimed that in 1997, before her husband filed his asylum claim, Odette applied under a different identity; her fingerprints and photograph were part of the application for Enite Alindor, a last name close to her mother’s maiden name. After that application was filed, no one ever again appeared to pursue it. An immigration judge ordered “Alindor” deported in absentia.

“They presented me with a name, and they said that this name is my name, and that it matched my fingerprints and that it had been in existence for 21 years,” Odette says. “They showed me a paper. They said that I was supposed to be deported, but that they had never found me.”

Dureland was charged criminally by the United States attorney for the Middle District of Florida. Dureland’s attorney, a federal public defender named Irina Hughes, eventually presented evidence to the judge that a document preparer Dureland had hired to help before she was granted asylum was convicted criminally several years later for defrauding clients, using their names and identities to file fake tax returns. Hughes suggested that the “Alindor” asylum application might have been connected to one of the man’s schemes, but the judge would not allow this evidence to be heard by the jury. Hughes also pointed to testimony by government officials who told Congress in the 1990s that immigration records from the time were often handled by private entities, including untrained storefront processors — so it would have been unsurprising to find a fraudulent application with someone else’s prints. There was no way, Hughes argued, that the government could credibly come back decades later and use those haphazard records to prove anything.

The prosecution of naturalized United States citizens like Odette Dureland is a sign, immigrant advocates fear, of a new and gathering storm for immigration policy in the Trump era. For decades, the debate over immigration in the United States has centered on who should be allowed to enter the country and who should be allowed to stay; citizens like Dureland have largely been exempted from that debate. But amid the Trump administration’s growing stridency on immigration, that may be changing. “We have always focused on those who have done something terrible,” a former Justice Department attorney told me. “If that’s now changing, if we’re going after people who did nothing of note, or whose wrong caused no harm, it means they’re going after citizenship.”

Dureland’s case was filed as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program called Operation Second Look, which grew out of a U.S.C.I.S. program started under the Obama administration called Operation Janus. ...

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