Immigration Article of the Day: Denaturalization's Missing Limit by Cassandra Burke Robertson and Irina D. Manta

Denaturalization's Missing Limit by Cassandra Burke Robertson and Irina D. Manta, Northwestern University Law Review Online (2026)

ABSTRACT

Civil denaturalization has become a bipartisan tool of punishment and deterrence. The government has used the civil justice system to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens convicted of serious crimes— including sex offenders—to “send a loud message” and “hold accountable” those it considers undesirable, circumventing the ten-year statute of limitations Congress imposed on criminal naturalization fraud. The Trump Administration has gone further, elevating denaturalization to one of the Department of Justice’s top five enforcement priorities and directing attorneys to “maximally pursue” every viable case. One of the features that makes denaturalization such a potent tool is the widely accepted proposition that no statute of limitations applies. This Essay argues that proposition is wrong. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s decision in Kokesh v. SEC, the text and structure of 28 U.S.C. § 2462, and the policy rationales underlying statutes of limitations, we argue that Congress’s existing default five-year limitations period should be understood to apply to civil denaturalization. A five-year time bar would preserve the government’s ability to pursue clear fraud while preventing the indefinite vulnerability that chills the political participation of over twenty-three million naturalized Americans.