Is denaturalization the next front in the Trump admin's war on immigration?

Dureland was charged criminally by the United States attorney for the Middle District of Florida. Dureland’s attorney, a federal public defender named Irina Hughes, eventually presented evidence to the judge that a document preparer Dureland had hired to help before she was granted asylum was convicted criminally several years later for defrauding clients, using their names and identities to file fake tax returns. Hughes suggested that the “Alindor” asylum application might have been connected to one of the man’s schemes, but the judge would not allow this evidence to be heard by the jury. Hughes also pointed to testimony by government officials who told Congress in the 1990s that immigration records from the time were often handled by private entities, including untrained storefront processors — so it would have been unsurprising to find a fraudulent application with someone else’s prints. There was no way, Hughes argued, that the government could credibly come back decades later and use those haphazard records to prove anything.

The prosecution of naturalized United States citizens like Odette Dureland is a sign, immigrant advocates fear, of a new and gathering storm for immigration policy in the Trump era. For decades, the debate over immigration in the United States has centered on who should be allowed to enter the country and who should be allowed to stay; citizens like Dureland have largely been exempted from that debate. But amid the Trump administration’s growing stridency on immigration, that may be changing. “We have always focused on those who have done something terrible,” a former Justice Department attorney told me. “If that’s now changing, if we’re going after people who did nothing of note, or whose wrong caused no harm, it means they’re going after citizenship.”