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In a 2019 report co-authored by Robertson, (Un)Civil Denaturalization, she writes that denaturalization was wielded frequently as a political tool in the McCarthy era.
"At the height of denaturalization, there were about 22,000 cases a year of denaturalization filed, and this was on a smaller population. It was huge," she told NPR.
The Supreme Court stepped in and issued a ruling in 1967 that said that denaturalization is "inconsistent with the American form of democracy, because it creates two levels of citizenship," Robertson explained.
"So the United States went from having 20,000 some cases of denaturalization a year to having just a handful, like 1, 2, 5, 6, very small numbers for years after 1967," Robertson said.
That is, until the Obama administration, which used new digital tools to find potential cases of naturalization fraud going back decades. Under Operation Janus, an initiative launched by immigration and justice officials in the Obama era, they claimed a national security interest in examining potential cases of immigration fraud that could be tied to terrorism.
