Today, I celebrate a milestone that represents years of patience, commitment, and perseverance: my U.S. naturalization journey.
My story began in October 2017, when I got married. In 2019, I started the residency process, taking the first formal steps toward building a future in the United States. After years of paperwork, waiting, and uncertainty, I was finally able to enter the U.S. legally in 2022 and begin a new chapter of my life.
In 2025, I started the naturalization process. By then, I knew the path would require dedication, but I did not expect to navigate a period of changes in the citizenship testing standards. The civics questionnaire was transitioning from 100 to 128 questions, so I prepared for both versions to ensure I was ready regardless of which test I would face.
In 2026, my interview was approved, marking the culmination of nearly a decade of effort, hope, and determination.
This journey has taught me that borders are more than lines on a map. They can separate countries, but they cannot limit human aspirations, resilience, or the desire to belong and contribute to a community.
As Anaïs Nin once said:
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.”
Today, I’m grateful for every step of that process, for the people who supported me along the way, and for the opportunity to continue building a life defined not by where I started, but by the values, work, and purpose I bring wherever I go.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials focused on denaturalization were sent to offices nationwide, sources say.
Colleen Long, Laura Strickler, Daniella Silva, and Nicole Acevedo at NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is dramatically expanding an effort to revoke U.S. citizenship for foreign-born Americans as it works to curb immigration, according to two people familiar with the plans.
Over the past several months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that’s responsible for legal immigration, has been sending experts to its offices around the country or reassigning staff members to focus on whether some citizens processed through those offices could now be denaturalized, these people said.
The goal of emphasizing naturalized citizens is to supply the office of immigration litigation with 100 to 200 possible cases per month, one of the people familiar with the plans said. Such cases have typically been very rare, involving people who concealed criminal histories or previous human rights violations during their application processes. The New York Times first reported the quota.
By comparison, throughout the four years of President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration formally filed a total of 102 such cases, according to the Justice Department.
The effort is part of the overall push by Homeland Security to drastically curtail immigration and deliver on Trump’s policy agenda. The push has included DHS’ sending scores of immigration enforcement officers into U.S. cities on deportation missions and purchasing mega warehouses to hold detainees.
DHS has also increasingly sought to remove legal immigrants from the U.S. by revoking thousands of visas, including for some people who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, and trying to deport green card holders.
[...]
Trump administration officials are looking for shortcuts to speed up the process, the two people familiar with the plans said. USCIS officials have concluded that dedicating staff members, either by sending experts or by training them across the agency’s 80-plus field offices nationwide, would be more effective in rooting out more cases than the previous Trump effort, headquartered in a warehouse in Pasadena, California, they said.
The Justice Department has already told attorneys to focus on denaturalization cases, and it has offered possible case examples, from “individuals who pose a risk to national security” or who have engaged in war crimes or torture to people who have committed Medicaid or Medicare fraud or have otherwise defrauded the government.
[...]
Trump has long been preoccupied with the notion of citizenship — who gets to be an American and who doesn’t — and has expressed displeasure with immigrants from what he calls third world nations. He is separately seeking the power to strip citizenship from those born to foreigners in the U.S., though “birthright citizenship” appears in the Constitution. The Supreme Court is weighing his argument.
[...]
Foreign-born Americans were generally stripped of citizenship only if they were found to have committed fraud during their application processes. In past decades, those cases focused on ferreting out former Nazis who fled to the U.S. after World War II under false pretenses. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to increase investigations, but it’s still rare for a reason, a former USCIS official said.
[...]
Republican lawmakers recently introduced a bill that would allow the government to strip citizenship from anyone found to have committed fraud against the government or joined a terrorist group or anyone who is convicted of a serious felony within 10 years of their citizenship.
So far in Trump’s second term, 16 cases have been filed and the administration has won seven, including one case involving a man originally from the United Kingdom who had been convicted of receiving and distributing sexually explicit images of children.
The Trump Regime is ramping up efforts to revoke US citizenship for foreign-born Americans in their nativist quest to reduce immigration, with plans to bring 100-200 such cases per month to meet mass deportation quotas.