The New York Times recently reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) intended to refer 384 foreign-born Americans for denaturalization. This is merely one in a long line of aggressive pushes to expand the scope of citizenship removal as a means of mass deportation. Indeed, between 1990 and 2017, the DOJ brought around 11 denaturalization cases per year. In 2025, however, the Executive issued guidance to “supply…100-200 denaturalization cases per month”.

In opening this three-part series, Part I argues that a mass-citizenship-stripping campaign of this nature is highly susceptible to error and abuse—concerns which compound in civil denaturalization proceedings. Part II argues that the unavailability of state-appointed defense counsel in such civil proceedings creates serious human rights concerns and renders the risk of error and abuse too high under due process standards. Part III concludes that any governmental interest in denying state-appointed counsel to civil denaturalization respondents is outweighed by these risks.

The U.S. Government cannot unilaterally or baselessly revoke citizenship. Foreign-born Americans may only be denaturalized through criminal or civil proceedings in federal district court (8 U.S.C. § 1451(a)). Furthermore, they must be given notice of those proceedings and the grounds on which they were initiated (8 U.S.C. § 1451(b)). In criminal proceedings, a citizen must be shown to have “[k]nowingly procured or attempted to procure naturalization in an unlawful manner” (18 U.S.C. § 1425). Contrastingly, some of the grounds for civil denaturalization include procuring citizenship unlawfully; procuring citizenship by willfully concealing a material fact; and affiliating with an allegedly subversive organization within a specified period before or after procuring citizenship (8 U.S.C. §§ 1451(a), (c); 1424).

Even with these basic safeguards, any program that seeks to deprive immigration status en masse drastically increases the risk of error and abuse, especially when it pressures officials to meet arbitrary quotas and target certain racial groups. We witnessed this in the early 20th century, when the U.S. denaturalized 22,000 people, not for fraud, but largely on the basis of viewpoint, race, and gender. We witnessed this in 1944, when the Supreme Court found the indiscriminate internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent to be lawful. And we are witnessing this now, with the slew of residents and even citizens being erroneously removed from U.S. soil. There is no basis to believe that the presence of some judicial process will now be sufficient to prevent significant error and abuse in this latest round of mass status-deprivation.

These concerns compound in civil denaturalization proceedings—arguably the preferred route for a government aiming to mass-deport rather than incarcerate or fine.

As noted, the relevant civil statutes provide the Government with the striking power to refer citizens for denaturalization for having associated with an allegedly subversive group. The law is so sweeping as to include any group that supposedly advocates “world communism” or the U.S. Government’s “overthrow”.

Such overbroad language is incompatible with the First Amendment: by failing to clearly delimit state power, citizens must guess at what conduct is proscribed, thus potentially chilling constitutionally protected expression. It also leaves excessive room for the quelling of disfavored beliefs. The Government may, for example, declare that professing certain views on race and gender is associated with government overthrow or that supporting Mayor Mamdani qualifies as noxious communist advocacy. And with nothing on the laws’ face – no statute of limitations, no right to jury, nor any specific precedent stopping it – the Government may use its barely checked declaration to expand its mass-denaturalization efforts even further.

Despite this potential for abuse, however, instead of the strict criminal “reasonable doubt” standard, the Government needs only to meet the lower “clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence” test in civil denaturalization claims (see Schneiderman (1943)). Quoting Klapprott (1949), Patel and O’Heron suggest that this standard is “substantially identical” to the criminal one, but they fail to discuss later jurisprudence that seemingly rejects this view. The courts in Addington (1979, at 424) and Mondaca-Vega (2015, at 14-15; fn 8), for example, indicated that “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” merely reformulates the well-known “clear and convincing” test, which demands only intermediate, not strict evidentiary scrutiny. Therefore, while the civil standard is certainly not without teeth, it is still “meaningfully” less protective than the criminal one.

Faced with an error-prone mass-denaturalization campaign, nebulous statutes, no statute of limitations, a single-judge bench trial, and a less protective evidentiary standard, civil respondents must navigate the citizenship-removal process without guaranteed access to counsel. Parts II and III explore how this latter deficiency breaches human rights and due process standards.