Jinchao Wei enlisted in the United States Navy in 2021. By February 2022, he was passing military secrets from the USS Essex to China's Ministry of State Security. Three months after that, he became a naturalized American citizen. He was paid $12,000 for his trouble.
He's one of forty.
The Trump Department of Justice announced the largest denaturalization effort in modern history this week — 40 cases filed in federal courts between August 21 and October 2, targeting individuals who allegedly obtained citizenship through fraud or committed crimes that should have disqualified them from ever holding an American passport. Attorney General Todd Blanche put it plainly: "Today's announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history."
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate laid out what the cases have in common. These aren't parking-ticket defendants. The charges behind the denaturalization filings include espionage, voluntary manslaughter, child pornography possession, aggravated sodomy, healthcare fraud, money laundering, passport fraud, and identity theft. The cases span federal courts in multiple districts, from the Southern District of California to the Middle District of Florida.
Wei's case is the espionage headliner. Convicted in August 2025 of conspiracy to commit espionage, he was sentenced to 200 months in federal prison. He used his Navy access to photograph sensitive military materials and hand them to Chinese intelligence. The citizenship he earned while actively spying for a foreign government is now on the chopping block.
Then there's Ping Li, a naturalized citizen and Florida resident who spent over a decade working for China. Li received a 48-month sentence, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. One of the other defendants — an Afghan-born man — used a false identity for nearly 30 years to maintain citizenship he never legally qualified for.
Espionage, fraud, violent crime, child exploitation. These people do not deserve to stay living within our borders.
The standard objection writes itself: denaturalization is an extreme remedy that could chill immigrant communities. That argument requires you to believe that stripping citizenship from a convicted spy who sold out the USS Essex for $12,000 somehow threatens the legal status of the nurse from Manila who did everything right. The cases filed name specific crimes, specific convictions, specific fraud. There is no slippery slope here. There's a list.
What makes the six-week timeline worth noting isn't just the volume — it's what the volume reveals about how long these cases sat. Wei was convicted over a year ago. Li's espionage ran for a decade. The Afghan identity fraud lasted nearly thirty years. The facts weren't hidden. The files existed. The previous approach was to let convicted spies and fraudsters keep the citizenship they'd stolen because pursuing revocation was too much paperwork. But what country allows a spy to stay after they've been convicted of espionage?
Not the U.S. -- anymore.