FBI Director Kash Patel appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to tout the agency’s successes in 2025 under President Donald Trump.
But Patel stressed there’s always room to improve, especially when it comes to naturalized citizens who want to harm America and face sentences for terrorism.
Mohamed Jalloh, a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone, opened fire on an ROTC class at Old Dominion last week, murdering the instructor and injuring others.
The former National Guardsman had been convicted in 2017 of supporting ISIS and expressed a desire to conduct “an attack similar to the November 2009 attack at Ft. Hood, Texas.”
But last week’s tremendous tragedy where a member of our military was killed in Norfolk by an individual, who has been investigated for terrorism, is a stark reminder of what we must do.That individual was convicted and sentenced for terrorism before, and no one bothered to denaturalize him and remove him from the country.But Sean, here’s what most Americans don’t know. In the Trump Justice Department in the first administration, that individual, we sought a sentence of 240 months. The judge in that case downward departed and gave him nearly half of that time. Had the judge given the sentence that the Trump administration wanted, that individual would still be in prison and not have conducted that terror attack.But it goes to the more important point. We need stronger legislation to remove individuals from this country who want to do us harm. The FBI is always going to be standing on the watch, but we need a collaborative effort from the legislative branch to make sure criminals in this country are jettisoned from this country, especially if they violate the rights of the Constitution and American safety.
It seems the U.S. will only revoke your citizenship if you mess up during the naturalization process:
That’s…it.
No crime, even federal crimes or terrorism, leads to denaturalization.
Even if the government invokes any of those criteria, it has to go through a court. The government cannot just revoke citizenship.
The DOJ must initiate a civil or criminal court proceeding.
The Supreme Court even narrowed the scope:
In 2017, the Supreme Court held in a unanimous decision in Maslenjak v. United States that only an illegal act that played a role in an individual’s acquisition of U.S. citizenship could lead to criminal denaturalization, narrowing the scope under which an individual may be denaturalized under 18 U.S.C. § 1425. In Maslenjak, the government under the Obama and Trump administrations sued to revoke Diana Maslenjak’s U.S. citizenship for making false statements regarding her husband’s membership in a Bosnian Serb militia in the 1990s. The Supreme Court ruled that if an applicant made a false statement during the citizenship process, the statement must have played some role in the individual obtaining citizenship in order to warrant the revocation of citizenship. The court stated that “small omissions and minor lies” that did not influence the award of citizenship do not necessitate denaturalization. Yet, it remains to be seen how courts will determine whether a false statement played a role in an individual obtaining citizenship.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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