National Defense

US Law Says These Foreign-Born Terrorists Are Just As American As You

(Screen Capture/Frontline PBS)

Immigration hard-liners are taking aim at rules that protect foreign-born U.S. citizens from deportation even if they become terrorists.

Naturalized citizens committed three suspected terrorist attacks in Texas, Michigan and Virginia in a two-week timeframe after the U.S. went to war with Iran’s Islamic regime in February. Other naturalized citizens caught plotting terrorist attacks have been released or are due for release back onto America’s streets, according to Department of Justice (DOJ), court and prison records.

Despite the jihadists’ crimes and increasing calls to expand denaturalizations, shredding their coveted status as American citizens is easier said than done; the system is unlikely to change without Congress passing contentious GOP-backed legislation.

“Naturalized citizens who attack our country and break our laws aren’t true Americans,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas told the Daily Caller News Foundation after introducing legislation on March 17 to strip criminals of citizenship, leading to deportation. “My bill creates a fair process to revoke citizenship from terrorists and felons.” The bill currently sits in the Senate Judiciary Committee with no co-sponsors.

Current law only permits denaturalization if someone fraudulently obtained citizenship, including if someone lied about having joined a foreign terrorist organization before applying. An exception is if someone becomes “affiliated” with the group within five years of naturalization, which can serve as evidence that they were insincere about their loyalty to America when applying, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website says. Joining a terrorist group more than five years after naturalization would not cost someone their citizenship.

Cotton’s bill would make terrorist group ties and certain serious crimes grounds for denaturalization regardless of timing. Another bill Republican Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt introduced in January would expand the timeline from five years after citizenship to 10.

“U.S. citizenship is a privilege that demands respect,” Immigration Accountability Project President Chris Chmielenski told the DCNF after his group endorsed Schmitt’s bill. “Any naturalized citizen who engages in criminal acts against the country has clearly abandoned their allegiance to our laws and no longer deserves the honor of holding that privilege.”

Schmitt’s legislation has 10 co-sponsors and was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar for consideration, records show. A House companion bill with 50 co-sponsors sits in the House Judiciary Committee. Neither Cotton’s nor Schmitt’s bills have Democratic supporters.

What Trump Thinks

President Donald Trump has not disclosed his stance on denaturalization reforms. For now, he “remains fully focused on protecting the American people and removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from the country,” a White House official told the DCNF, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive matters.

“The White House wouldn’t get ahead of President Trump on any potential legislation he may or may not support,” the person said. However, Trump’s officials have moved to dramatically ramp up denaturalizations on existing legal grounds, the DCNF previously reported.

Denaturalizations were rare before Trump took power, with an average of 11 cases opened per year from 1990 to 2017, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. By contrast, an average of about 758,000 people were naturalized per year between fiscal years 2005 and 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Trump’s first administration increased denaturalization cases from 18 in fiscal year 2017 to at least 51 in fiscal year 2020, official data show. The government had an average success rate of 87% for the cases between those fiscal years. In his second term, USCIS aims to refer at least 100 cases to the DOJ per month, an agency spokesperson previously told the DCNF. The department filed at least 13 in 2025, The New York Times reported.

Denaturalization cases can take years to work their way through the courts. The Obama administration filed a case in 2015 against an Al-Qaeda trainer who fraudulently obtained citizenship, and the Trump administration won a court ruling that denaturalized him in 2017. The terrorist spent twelve years as a California resident recruiting local Muslims to Al-Qaeda, the group behind the devastating 9/11 attacks, before law enforcement caught him.

Citizens Gone Rogue

Trump’s first administration found in 2018 that foreign-born people were linked to most terrorist incidents in the U.S., a statistic he used to justify a travel ban on majority-Muslim countries. Additionally, the review determined that 148 naturalized U.S. citizens were convicted of international terrorism crimes between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2016.

Those 148 made up 58% of foreign-born convicted terrorists in the 15-year period, according to the study. They include an Iranian military asset who plotted to kill a foreign ambassador and innocent bystanders in the U.S., a Somali-born citizen who aimed to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon and a Pakistan native who intended to help Al-Qaeda bomb Washington’s public transit stations. All three will be released over the next decade, Bureau of Prisons (BOP) records show.

Prosecutors continued to convict naturalized citizens of serious terrorism offenses after 2016, though the full number is unknown, a DCNF analysis of DOJ press releases and court records found. Later cases involved a Pakistan native who plotted a knife attack in New York for ISIS and an Iranian-born man who sought to blow up a high school — set for release in 2027 and 2031, respectively, BOP records show.

Other foreign-born citizens who fought for ISIS in the Middle East, recruited for Al-Qaeda in Yemen, plotted to help foreign jihadists target Washington, D.C., and fraudulently raised funds for terrorists in Minnesota’s Somali community have already been released, according to the BOP.

Most recently, naturalized U.S. citizen Mohamed Jalloh shouted “Allahu akbar” and began shooting in a Virginia ROTC class on March 12, killing an instructor before cadets killed him, officials said. Jalloh, originally from Sierra Leone, was convicted in 2016 of trying to aid ISIS in a potential attack on the U.S.

Bush-appointed Judge Liam O’Grady gave Jalloh a sentence nine years below the DOJ’s suggestion in 2017, court records show. He noted, however, that Jalloh’s prior U.S. military service made his betrayal of America particularly “troubling.”

“You were willing to take significant steps to support [ISIS] even though you had spent six years in the National Guard,” O’Grady said at Jalloh’s sentencing hearing. “And that is so hard to really understand in looking at your background.”