A New Jersey man was stripped of his citizenship last week on the grounds that he provided a false name to authorities to avoid deportation. The man, Baljinder Singh, has lived in the US for 25 years.
Authorities say that when Sing arrived in the US from his native India in 1991 he was carrying no identification with him. He gave authorities the name Davinder Singh. After failing to appear in immigration court in January 1992, a judge ordered him to be deported. Singh then filed an application for asylum under the name Baljinder the next month, and married a U.S. citizen.
Singh became a permanent resident in 1996, and a citizen in 2006. But he never disclosed his prior deportation order in his paperwork, prosecutors say. The Justice Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services filed the civil denaturalization complaint against Singh in September.
Singh has become the first person to be denaturalized under a new Department of Homeland Security program that strips individuals of their citizenship when its discovered that they circumvented proper background checks during the naturalization process. There are currently 1,600 cases similar to Singh’s underway in Operation Janus, as it’s known, that will be recommended for judgement, accorded to the Justice Department.