Two criminals, a convicted gun trafficker and a fraudster, are citizens of the United States no longer after action by the Department of Justice, which charged that the two were not eligible for citizenship because they obtained their status through fraud.
“American citizenship is a sacred privilege,” explained Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Not a cheap status that can be obtained dishonestly.”
She said the actions to denaturalize the individuals “reflect this Department of Justice’s ongoing efforts to strip citizenship from people who conceal crimes or defraud the American people during the immigration process.”
The announcement from the DOJ said it also still is working to revoke the citizenship of a third person, who participated in marriage fraud.
A report at Fox News said the first individual was Valdimir Volgaev, from Ukraine.
He “concealed and misrepresented his involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle over a thousand firearms components out of the United States and ship them to foreign markets,” the report said.
Brett Shumate, assistant attorney general, explained, “This case sends a clear message. The United States provided Volgaev with safety, housing, and citizenship, and he returned those gains with malice, including by defrauding one of the federal agencies that provided him benefits. We will not reward this kind of behavior by allowing such an individual to retain U.S. citizenship that should not have been granted in the first place.”
Volgaev actually was convicted of “smuggling goods from the United States and theft of government money or property.”
The second person denaturalized was Mirelys Cabrera Diaz, a native of Cube, who pursued and obtained citizenship even though she was disqualified “because she committed unlawful acts – namely a health care fraud conspiracy.”
She was convicted in 2019 in Florida of “conspiring to commit health care fraud, pleading guilty and being sentenced to 29 months behind bars. She was ordered to pay $6 million restitution.
“She specifically admitted that, between August 2011 and March 2014, she and her co-conspirators paid kickbacks to patient recruiters for referring fraudulent prescriptions to the pharmacy where she worked. She admitted to maintaining a log of how much money was owed to each recruiter for fraudulent prescriptions,” the report said.
The denaturalization of the third person, Alec Nasreddine Kassir of Lebanon, still is in the works.
“Kassir falsely represented that he had been living with a U.S. citizen spouse, during the three years immediately preceding the filing of his naturalization application in March 2010,” the government has charged.
He admitted “passport fraud,” the government said.
