The Justice Department is trying to strip the U.S. citizenship of a Capuchin friar convicted of sexually abusing two children at a Washington parish, arguing he concealed his crimes to become a citizen in the first place.
Reviewed by Survivor Justice Alliance · Updated 2026-10-21
Figures reported in Catholic press coverage of the Justice Department's denaturalization complaint.
The Justice Department has filed a civil complaint asking a federal court to strip U.S. citizenship from a Capuchin friar who is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence. He was convicted of multiple counts of child sexual abuse involving two children, one a 13-year-old girl and the other aged 9 to 10 at the time, at a parish in Washington, D.C. between 2015 and 2017.
The case is not an appeal of his criminal conviction and does not affect his existing sentence directly. It is a distinct civil action asking a court to declare that his citizenship, granted in 2017, should never have been approved in the first place.
Naturalization applications require an applicant to disclose, among other things, whether they have committed acts that could affect their eligibility for citizenship. The DOJ alleges the friar became a citizen in 2017, the same year his abuse of one of the two children was still ongoing, and that he obtained that status through willful misrepresentation and concealment of the underlying crimes.
When the government can later prove that kind of concealment, it can pursue denaturalization even years after citizenship was granted and even after a criminal case has already run its course, because the legal theory rests on the integrity of the naturalization process itself rather than on the original crime alone.
The abuse allegations became known in 2018, at which point the archdiocese that oversaw the parish removed him from ministry. He was ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2019, and later received an additional short sentence in 2021 tied to a separate incident involving an adult in 2017.
The denaturalization filing adds a second, slower-moving legal track onto a case that already spanned a criminal prosecution and an internal church removal, illustrating how a single set of underlying facts can generate several distinct proceedings across different systems and years.
Stripping someone's citizenship does not create compensation for the people he harmed, and it does not resolve any separate civil claims a survivor might bring against the parish, the religious order, or the archdiocese that employed and supervised him. It is a federal action focused entirely on the legitimacy of his naturalization.
For survivors and their attorneys, a case like this can still matter indirectly: the DOJ's filing lays out a detailed timeline and evidentiary record of concealment that could inform how a related civil claim describes what the parish or archdiocese knew, and when, even though the two proceedings remain legally separate.
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A single set of facts involving clergy abuse can generate several separate legal proceedings over the years. Here is how this case's different tracks relate to one another.
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It is a federal civil process, separate from a criminal case, in which the government asks a court to revoke a person's U.S. citizenship, typically on the grounds that it was obtained through fraud or concealment.
No. Denaturalization is a distinct legal action and does not affect an existing criminal sentence, which continues to run on its own separate track.
They generally revert to their prior immigration status, which can then lead to separate removal, or deportation, proceedings, though that is a further step beyond denaturalization itself.
Not directly. It does not create or resolve any civil claim for damages, though the factual record it produces can sometimes be useful to survivors pursuing their own separate lawsuit.