Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) last month introduced the Stop Citizenship Abuse and Misrepresentation (SCAM) Act to protect the integrity of American citizenship through commonsense measures to the naturalization process by expanding and clarifying grounds to revoke the citizenship of individuals who never met the statutory requirements.
The legislation, which would provide a process to strip citizenship from individuals engaging in serious criminal conduct, fraud, or terrorist activities, comes in response to the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota – which Schmidt describes as "a wake-up call."
Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), points out that when people come to the United States and become citizens, they take an oath.
"They have sworn to fully disclose everything that we need to know about them," he notes. "If that disclosure comes up short, if they have misled us, then we have a right to say we're just going to roll things back and denaturalize you."
He adds that the idea of denaturalization is nothing new.
"We have denaturalized people who have come to the United States and have acquired citizenship without fully disclosing who they are, what their ideologies were," Mehlman asserts.
Some people who came to the states after World War II, for example, had affiliations with the Nazis. When that was discovered, those individuals were denaturalized.
More recently, a Venezuelan woman's citizenship was revoked in November 2025 for prior involvement in a criminal conspiracy defrauding Medicare of over $5.4 million and for concealing her crimes during her citizenship application. A man living in Maryland was denaturalized in September 2025 based on his conviction for second-degree rape of a minor victim, and a British man was denaturalized in June 2025 for downloading and distributing child pornography both before and after his naturalization in early 2013.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota has introduced the SCAM Act's companion in the House.
"If you came to this country to harm and take advantage of the American people … you're going home," he stated. "It's common sense, and the SCAM Act will make it law."
