Amid the ongoing debate over the US H1-B visas, Baljinder Singh alias Davinder Singh, 43, who married an American citizen, became the first Indian to lose his American citizenship under President Donald Trump. The US authorities said that Baljinder had acquired this citizenship by fraud. He has now been reverted to the Green Card status which leaves him potentially subject to removal proceedings at the Department of Homeland Security’s discretion, the Justice Department said.
The Department of Justice, which moved a petition in this regard before a US court last September, said that Singh in his citizenship application concealed prior orders of exclusion and his deportation under different identities than the identity under which they naturalised.
“Singh’s denaturalisation is the first arising out of a growing body of cases referred to the Department of Justice by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as part of Operation Janus,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
Singh who is a native of India, arrived at San Francisco International Airport on September 25, 1991, without any travel documents or proof of identity. He claimed that his name was Davinder Singh. He was placed in exclusion proceedings, but failed to appear for his immigration court hearing and was ordered excluded and deported on January 7, 1992, federal prosecutors said. Four weeks later, he allegedly filed an application under the name Baljinder Singh but abandoned it after he married a US citizen, who filed a visa petition on his behalf.
The order to revoke Singh’s US citizenship and cancelling his Certificate of Naturalisation was passed by a US District Court in New Jersey on January 5. The Department of Homeland, in total, has identified about 315,000 cases where some fingerprint data was missing from the centralised digital fingerprint repository under Operation Jesus.
Among those cases, some may have sought to circumvent criminal record and other background checks in the naturalisation process, feels the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department said that these cases are the result of an ongoing collaboration between the two departments to investigate and seek denaturalisation proceedings against those who obtained citizenship unlawfully.