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On October 1, the government sued in U.S. District Court in Connecticut to strip Dexter Anson of the citizenship he obtained after, prosecutors say, he had already been ordered deported under another name.
The complaint is one of 40 denaturalization actions filed between August 21 and October 2, the largest single-period batch of the Trump administration. Attorney General Todd Blanche called it “the largest denaturalization effort in modern history.” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate was more direct: “Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship.”
Anson is 72 and from Ghana. The Justice Department says he applied for a diversity visa and then for naturalization without disclosing that he had already sought immigration benefits, and been ordered deported, as George Opoku. The complaint charges illegal procurement of naturalization, and procurement by willful misrepresentation or concealment of a material fact.
The government said a diversity visa was not available to him if he had already applied for benefits by fraud under the Opoku identity, so he was never lawfully admitted as a permanent resident. He also could not have shown the good moral character naturalization requires, the complaint says, because before he took the oath he had already violated three federal statutes that criminalize giving false information to the government. At his naturalization interview he failed to disclose the prior deportation proceedings and the deportation order in the other name. He concealed the other name itself.
Denaturalization under the Immigration and Nationality Act is available when citizenship was illegally procured, or procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation. The burden is on the government. Anson has not been stripped of anything yet.
The rest of the complaints were filed in 19 different federal districts. The conduct DOJ describes runs from espionage — Jinchao Wei, a Chinese-born former Navy sailor convicted of conspiring to sell military secrets to China — to sexual abuse of minors, aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man, voluntary manslaughter, marriage fraud, tax fraud, and identity fraud that in one Pennsylvania case spanned nearly 30 years. Defendants range in age from 26 to 76 and came from 17 countries. Mexico accounts for the largest share.
Connecticut already had two of these cases on the docket before Anson. In June the department sued to denaturalize Tahir Lekaj, a native of Yugoslavia naturalized in 2005, after a Connecticut jury convicted him of child sex abuse, and Talman Harris, a native of Jamaica naturalized in 2014, after a federal jury in Ohio convicted him in a stock-manipulation scheme.
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