The Justice Department is seeking to denaturalize a former Marine born in Ghana because of a sex crime he committed after he became a U.S. citizen. The former Marine, Nicholas Eshun, who pleaded guilty in 2015 to attempted sexual assault of a child, was naturalized through a program that expedites citizenship for members of the military.
He stands to lose his citizenship based on a statute that applies to immigrants who fail to complete at least five years in the armed forces and depart without an honorable discharge.
Legal experts say that statute, amended to its current form in 2003, does not appear to have been enforced in decades, and revoking citizenship for acts committed after naturalization is exceedingly rare.
The case is emerging just as the Trump administration has begun a new push to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of foreign-born U.S. citizens. But it is uncertain whether Mr. Eshun’s case reflects a widening category of denaturalization targets or a single, unusual case.
“In the modern era it is unprecedented to denaturalize individuals for conduct after becoming a naturalized citizen,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia who wrote a book about the history of American citizenship.
For nearly 60 years, the government’s general practice has been to seek to revoke citizenship from people accused of fraud or of omitting information from their citizenship applications, not from those who committed crimes after they became citizens. A 1967 Supreme Court ruling effectively barred the government from stripping Americans of their citizenship unless they obtained it fraudulently.
Experts in citizenship law said the effort to end Mr. Eshun’s citizenship, by enforcing the 2003 statute for military members, raised a complex legal issue. It calls into question whether that statute conflicts with the Supreme Court precedent and, more broadly, whether the Constitution allows Congress to set parameters to revoke American citizenship after it was lawfully obtained.
Ming H. Chen, a law professor at the University of California San Francisco who specializes in citizenship jurisprudence, said that the details of Mr. Eshun’s case and sex crime conviction made him a “highly unsympathetic” defendant, and that they could “make it easier for a judge to allow a denaturalization case to move forward.”
Such a decision in a single case, she said, might raise the prospect of other such cases involving acts committed after a person had attained citizenship. “What really matters is it opens the door to this idea of conditional citizenship,” said Ms. Chen.
In the early 20th century, the government revoked U.S. citizenship from people for a wide range of reasons. Women once lost it automatically for marrying a citizen of another country. Taking a second citizenship, serving in another country’s military and voting in an election overseas were also grounds for ending a person’s U.S. citizenship.
But the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in the case Afroyim v. Rusk made denaturalizations exceedingly rare, establishing that under the Constitution, U.S. citizenship, if obtained properly, could only be relinquished voluntarily. “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in the opinion for the 5-4 majority.
The effort to end the U.S. citizenship of Mr. Eshun, 37, began before the Trump administration’s request to revoke the citizenship of 12 other immigrants as part of a broader push. In a memo issued last June, the Justice Department said it would “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings,” targeting, among others, those who commit sex offenses, fraud and drug offenses.
And in Congress, some allies of the administration are pressing for sweeping changes to naturalization law. Earlier this year, two Republican members of Congress introduced bills seeking to give the government broader authority to revoke citizenship.
In Mr. Eshun’s case, court records show that he came to the United States 15 years ago as part of the tiny fraction of successful applicants to the so-called Green Card lottery. Congress created the lottery in the 1990s and millions apply for 55,000 slots each year.
Mr. Eshun settled in Maryland, and soon joined the Marine Corps, where he trained as an electrician, court records show. In March of 2014, Mr. Eshun became an American citizen under a program that gives members of the armed forces an expedited path to naturalization.
During a deployment in Okinawa, Japan, in 2015, Mr. Eshun was charged with attempted sexual assault of a child following a sting operation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. According to court records, Mr. Eshun was accused of chatting online with an agent posing as a 14-year-old girl, and driving to a residence intending to have sex.
Mr. Eshun pleaded guilty in military court. He is listed on the Maryland sex offender registry, a condition of his plea deal. He was sentenced to 18 months of confinement, had his rank reduced and was dishonorably discharged from the military after four years and six months in the service.
That service time fell within the five-year period in which the government has the authority to revoke citizenship from members of the military under the 2003 provision that legal experts said they had not seen enforced.
Justice Department officials declined to answer questions about Mr. Eshun’s case, but Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a news release that the case showed that the government “is using every lawful tool to protect the American people and to ensure that citizenship is not a shield for criminals who never deserved it in the first place.”
Reached by phone, Mr. Eshun, who lives in Maryland, said he would be willing to talk about his case at a later point, but did not respond to subsequent calls and text messages.
Mr. Eshun, who has no lawyer listed in his citizenship case and has so far represented himself, could lose his citizenship if a judge orders it. If Mr. Eshun challenges the government’s effort, legal experts said, that could lead to a test of the limits to denaturalization established by the 1967 Supreme Court case.
Armando Ghinaglia, a lawyer who became a U.S. citizen through his own military service, said that if the government successfully denaturalized Mr. Eshun, it could open the door to other cases involving naturalized citizens accused of criminal behavior after they became U.S. citizens.
Laws allowing revocation of citizenship for a range of offenses, including refusing to testify before Congress about certain matters, “have never been tested squarely against Afroyim because no one has tried to enforce them in decades,” Mr. Ghinaglia said.
Thomas H. Dupree Jr., a former senior Justice Department official who oversaw immigration litigation during the George W. Bush administration said that such cases had been a low priority for the government until recently. Cases can be hard to prove, Mr. Dupree said, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Afroyim v. Rusk significantly narrowed the grounds for pursuing them.
He said that Mr. Eshun’s case and others filed by the government suggested that “the Justice Department is pushing hard on cases where it thinks denaturalization is warranted, and it’s not afraid to push hard on existing legal precedents.”
The Justice Department sent Mr. Eshun a letter last November — more than a decade after his conviction — asking him to relinquish his citizenship voluntarily. Mr. Eshun declined. A month later, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to revoke his citizenship in federal court.
In filings, the Justice Department described Mr. Eshun’s crime as “morally abhorrent,” and said it justified his denaturalization. Before Mr. Eshun entered a guilty plea during his court-martial, he acknowledged to the military judge who oversaw the case that he understood it could lead to the loss of his citizenship and to deportation, according to a transcript of the hearing.
After Mr. Eshun, who is not a lawyer, failed to respond to the government’s complaint, Judge Brendan A. Hurson warned that if he failed to present a defense, “he would be denaturalized as a U.S. citizen.”
In response, Mr. Eshun sent the court a letter seeking leniency. Mr. Eshun wrote that he had worked hard since leaving the military to provide for his family, including a 3-year-old son.
“Before my incident, I had served honorably,” he wrote. He added: “I am pleading with the court to allow me to keep my citizenship so that I can be in my son’s life and take care of him.”
Hans H. Chen, the deputy chief of the Justice Department’s denaturalization unit, urged Judge Hurson not to allow those concerns to affect his ruling. If Mr. Eshun were to lose his citizenship, Mr. Chen wrote, it was not certain that the government would ultimately deport him. Such suggestions were speculative, he wrote.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research and JoAnna Daemmrich contributed reporting.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy. He welcomes tips and can be reached at elondono.81 on Signal.
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