The Supreme Court on Thursday vacated lower courts’ decision to denaturalize a U.S. citizen because she made a false statement to an immigration official, and remanded the case for further review.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the 9-0 opinion in Maslenjak v. United States, which said that before citizenship is stripped, the government must first show that an illegal act, like lying, was an important factor during the naturalization process.
“When the illegal act is a false statement, that means demonstrating that the defendant lied about facts that would have mattered to an immigration official, because they would have justified denying naturalization or would predictably have led to other facts warranting that result,” Kagan wrote.
Under the government’s reading of federal law, Kagan wrote, “a lie told in the naturalization process — even out of embarrassment, fear, or a desire for privacy — would always provide a basis for rescinding citizenship. The government could thus take away on one day what it was required to give the day before.”
Divina Maslenjak met a U.S. immigration official to obtain refugee status for her family near the end of the Bosnian civil war. She denied giving false information to gain entry into the U.S. while undergoing the naturalization process, but she later admitted lying to an immigration officer while under oath in separate proceedings about her husband’s residency status. She was subsequently convicted of naturalization fraud and stripped of her citizenship.
Questions about what sorts of fibs could cause the government to take away one’s citizenship prompted a series of incredulous questions aimed at the Justice Department during April oral arguments before the high court. The Justice Department argued that ignoring speeding laws could wind up costing a naturalized American his or her U.S. citizenship, depending on how one represented flouting the speeding laws. The government’s arguments spawned a number of hypothetical scenarios from justices across the ideological spectrum and led Chief Justice John Roberts to exclaim “Oh, come on.”
In deciding the case on Thursday, three of the high court’s right-leaning justices — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito — submitted concurring opinions expressing reservations against the overreaching they perceived in the Supreme Court’s opinion. Gorsuch authored a concurrence joined by Thomas that agreed the denaturalization decision should be reversed, but said he “respectfully” thought Kagan’s opinion went too far in developing “new tests” for how to adjudicate similar cases in the future.
