Seven Florida Cases Are Part of the Justice Department's Largest Push Yet to Strip Citizenship From Naturalized Americans

Seven of the 40 denaturalization lawsuits in what the Justice Department calls the largest single batch of the Trump administration were filed in Florida federal courts, targeting naturalized citizens from Hialeah to Wesley Chapel whom the government accuses of lying their way to U.S. citizenship. The complaints, filed between Aug. 21 and Oct. 2, 2026, ask judges in the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida to revoke citizenship from people the government says hid crimes, used false identities or misrepresented their family ties during naturalization.

The Justice Department announced the batch on Oct. 5, and the Florida cases drew new attention this week as local outlets, including WKMG News 6 in Orlando, detailed who was named. Each case is a civil lawsuit, not a criminal prosecution, and the department's own release stresses that the claims are allegations only and that no court has determined liability.

What the Justice Department announced

According to the department, the 40 complaints were filed in 19 federal districts, from California and Arizona to Pennsylvania and Virginia, with the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida among them. The department said the defendants are accused of offenses including acting as an agent of a foreign government, voluntary manslaughter and sexual crimes against minors, and that each concealed critical facts during the naturalization process.

Attorney General Todd Blanche called it the largest denaturalization effort in modern history, according to the release, and said the department would keep using the process to protect national security. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, who leads the Civil Division, said in the release that every one of the defendants lied to obtain citizenship and that the administration would continue what he described as the largest denaturalization effort in the department's history.

The Florida cases

The department's release describes seven Florida filings. Five went to the Southern District of Florida, based in Miami, and two to the Middle District, which covers Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville.

In the Aug. 31 case, the government seeks to revoke the citizenship of Yusmary Shirley Duran Mejia of Hialeah, who the department says entered the United States in 2007 and naturalized in 2018. She was charged in 2019 and convicted in 2020 of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and the department says she admitted in the criminal case that her involvement began before she became a citizen.

The Sept. 28 complaint targets Arnouse Merlien of West Palm Beach, who naturalized in 2016 and was convicted in 2018 in federal court in Georgia of conspiring to defraud the government by filing fraudulent income tax refund claims. The department says the conspiracy took place in the years leading up to her naturalization.

The Sept. 30 case names Ralph Nabavi of Miami, who the department says pleaded guilty to tax evasion after being charged in 2019 with underreporting at least $12.5 million in income and underpaying $3.5 million in federal taxes. The government alleges he began moving business money into personal accounts to avoid taxes before he naturalized in 2014.

The Middle District case filed Oct. 1 involves Ping Li, the Wesley Chapel man who pleaded guilty on Aug. 19, 2024, to conspiring to act as an agent of the People's Republic of China without notifying the attorney general. Federal prosecutors in Tampa said at the time that Li, working at the direction of Ministry of State Security officers from at least 2012, gathered information on Chinese dissidents, pro-democracy advocates and Falun Gong practitioners and passed along sensitive information from his employers, a major U.S. telecommunications company and an international information technology firm. He was sentenced in November 2024 to four years in federal prison. The new complaint argues his conduct shows he was not attached to the principles of the Constitution when he naturalized.

The other three Florida cases describe a man the government says sexually abused a minor beginning around 2000 and was later sentenced in state court to concurrent terms of eight and five years; a man who entered on a tourist visa in 1993, applied for asylum under a different name in 1994, skipped his immigration hearing and later obtained a green card through a family petition under his real name; and a Mexican-born man the government says obtained permanent residency by falsely claiming his aunt, a naturalized citizen, was his mother. The Florida Press is not naming the defendants in those three cases: two do not involve criminal charges, and naming the third could identify a victim.

How denaturalization works

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a naturalized citizen's citizenship can be revoked and the naturalization certificate canceled if it was illegally procured or obtained by concealing a material fact or by willful misrepresentation. The government brings these cases as civil lawsuits in federal district court, where a judge, not a jury, decides them. The U.S. Supreme Court has long required the government to prove its case by clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence, a higher bar than in most civil litigation, because of how much is at stake.

Several of the Florida complaints rely on a common theory: that a person who committed crimes before naturalizing, then failed to disclose them or testified falsely during the process, could not show the good moral character the law requires of applicants. According to the department's descriptions, that argument underpins the money laundering and tax cases filed in South Florida.

A person who loses citizenship generally loses the rights that came with it and can be placed in removal proceedings, depending on their immigration history.

A broader federal priority

For decades, the federal government used denaturalization sparingly. The Trump administration has made it a priority. In June 2025, Shumate issued a Civil Division memo directing department lawyers to prioritize denaturalization cases where the law supports them, and the department has filed a steady stream of complaints since. The October announcement is the largest batch to date, according to the department.

Florida is home to one of the largest populations of naturalized citizens in the country, and seven of the 40 cases in this batch, more than one in six, were filed in the state's federal courts.

What's next

Each defendant can contest the complaint in federal court, and none of the seven Florida cases has been decided. Denaturalization cases can end in default judgments when defendants do not respond, or be litigated for months when they do. The Justice Department has said it will continue to use the process. For now, the seven Florida complaints remain allegations, and the citizenship of each person named stays intact unless and until a federal judge orders otherwise.