USCIS Is Using AI to Re-Review 5 Years of Citizenship Cases

USCIS has reassigned officers from their normal caseloads to comb back through every naturalization grant from the last five years, using artificial intelligence to flag files for possible denaturalization. The scale of the review is large; the number of people it can actually reach is not.

Immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who says his firm is handling several of these cases, described the effort on his June 16, 2026 update and led with the math.

The push traces to a June 11, 2025 memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate directing the DOJ Civil Division to make denaturalization a top enforcement priority, which AILA has catalogued alongside the cases that have followed. NPR reported that the directive instructs attorneys to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” and that USCIS has been feeding the Division large batches of referrals. Kuck’s estimate of roughly 50 people placed in proceedings is in the same range as the case counts reported in the months since.

What keeps the number small is the law, not the agency’s appetite. Denaturalization runs under 8 U.S.C. § 1451, and a court can revoke citizenship only where it was “illegally procured” or obtained “by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” It is not a tool for second-guessing a properly granted citizenship. As Kuck put it, the government can only reach people who should never have been naturalized in the first place.

In practice, that points at two fact patterns. The first is a crime committed before naturalization that the applicant hid. The naturalization form, Form N-400, asks directly about it.

Answering “no” to that question is meaningless on its own; almost everyone does. It becomes a denaturalization hook only if the applicant had in fact committed a crime, was later arrested and convicted for it, and that conduct predated the oath. The second pattern is older fraud: someone who lied about their identity or another material fact earlier in the process and carried that lie through naturalization without ever correcting it.

The “material” qualifier protects everyone else. In Maslenjak v. United States, the Supreme Court held in 2017 that the government cannot strip citizenship over an immaterial false statement. The lie must have actually mattered to the naturalization decision.

Most denaturalization that ends in actual revocation also runs as a civil case, where the person gets notice and a chance to defend in federal court rather than a summary administrative action. The AI sweep flags files for review. It does not decide them.

So who should pay attention? Not the millions whose applications were clean. The people with reason to prepare are those with a conviction for conduct that predated naturalization and that they did not disclose, and those who know a misrepresentation sits somewhere in an old green-card or naturalization filing, such as a false claim to U.S. citizenship or an undisclosed marriage that should have been declared. For them, the move is to talk to a lawyer now and map the exposure before a letter arrives, not after.

• Pull your own A-file through FOIA so you know what the government already has.
• If there is a pre-naturalization conviction or an old misrepresentation, get a candid legal assessment of whether it was material, the standard the government must meet.
• Do not volunteer corrections or withdrawals without counsel; the framing of any disclosure matters as much as the underlying fact.