President Trump said his administration was taking steps to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizenship, with a particular eye for those of Somali descent.
“I would do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest,” Mr. Trump said in an Oval Office interview. “I think that many of the people that came in from Somalia, they hate our country.”
During a nearly two-hour interview with New York Times reporters, Mr. Trump said that his administration was examining the criteria for taking away citizenship. He said his effort was not limited to the Somali community but declined to specify the other groups of foreign-born American citizens his administration was targeting.
“If they deserve to be stripped, I would, yes,” Mr. Trump said.
Stripping some naturalized Somalis of their citizenship would be a significant escalation in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has begun moving beyond those in the country illegally. He has fixated for years on the Somali community, but in recent months has focused on an investigation into fraud that had taken place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in Minnesota to make broad assertions about the community.
Since 2022, federal prosecutors have convicted dozens of people on felony charges, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many Somali-Americans have expressed concern that the fraud damaged the reputation of tens of thousands of people at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.
Mr. Trump’s comments came after The New York Times last month reported that the administration issued guidance to field offices for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the nation’s legal immigration agency, asking that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year.
Under federal law, people may be denaturalized only if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. The administration, however, has not hesitated to use every tool at its disposal for Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Activists have warned that the denaturalization effort could sweep up people who had made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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