Gurmeet Singh entered the United States on a temporary visa in 1992. By 2011, he had kidnapped a woman at knifepoint and raped her. By 2014, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Somewhere in between, he applied for citizenship and conveniently forgot to mention the whole kidnapping-and-rape thing on the paperwork.
Now he's not a citizen anymore.
The Department of Justice announced on August 31 that a federal court in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has revoked Singh's citizenship entirely. A full denaturalization — the legal equivalent of erasing the paperwork, as if the fraudulent oath never happened.
Attorney General Todd Blanche didn't mince words. "American citizenship is not a shield for criminals," Blanche said. He followed that up with a statement that reads like it was written for a plaque: "Gurmeet Singh, a convicted rapist from India, is no longer a U.S. citizen. He concealed a rape and kidnapping during the naturalization process, and a federal court has now revoked his citizenship. This Department took this case across the finish line, and we will continue to move expeditiously on denaturalization referrals. Fraudulently obtained citizenship will not protect criminals from justice."
Denaturalization is a tool that's been on the books for decades but rarely used with any urgency. The Trump administration has made it a priority — not as some abstract policy goal, but as a specific enforcement mechanism aimed at people who committed fraud to obtain citizenship and then committed serious crimes on American soil. Singh is eligible for release in 2029. Without this action, he would have walked out of prison still holding a U.S. passport.
What makes this case instructive isn't just Singh himself — it's the timeline. Twelve years passed between his temporary visa and the crime. Another three years between the crime and conviction. Another twelve before the citizenship was revoked. We're talking about a quarter century of a system that moved slowly enough for a man to build a life, commit a violent felony, get convicted, serve most of a sentence, and still hold citizenship the entire time.
The DOJ says it will "continue to move expeditiously on denaturalization referrals." That's the right direction. The question is how many Gurmeet Singhs are sitting in federal prison right now, serving sentences for violent crimes, with citizenship papers that were obtained through the same kind of fraud.
