The Justice Department has filed a civil complaint seeking to strip the U.S. citizenship of a friar already serving a 15-year sentence for abusing two children at a Washington, D.C. parish. The action runs on its own track, separate from any survivor's civil claim.
Reviewed by Survivor Justice Alliance · Updated 2026-10-27
Figures reflect the Justice Department's civil complaint and related court records reported July 23-27, 2026.
The Justice Department has asked a federal court to strip U.S. citizenship from a Capuchin friar who is currently serving a 15-year federal prison sentence. He was convicted in 2019 of multiple counts of child sexual abuse involving two children, one 13 years old and the other roughly nine or ten, tied to conduct at a parish in Washington, D.C. between 2015 and 2016. A second conviction in 2021 involved separately touching an adult woman inappropriately during confession in 2017, adding a consecutive sentence of up to 180 days.
This new filing is not an appeal and does not touch his existing sentence. It is a distinct, five-count civil complaint asking the court to declare that his citizenship, granted in 2017, should never have been approved.
Naturalization requires an applicant to disclose conduct that could affect eligibility for citizenship. The government's complaint alleges the friar committed his crimes before, during, and after the naturalization process, and that he obtained citizenship through willful misrepresentation and concealment of that conduct.
Once that kind of concealment can be shown, the government can pursue denaturalization years after citizenship was granted and well after a criminal case has run its course, because the legal theory concerns the integrity of the naturalization process itself, not a re-litigation of the original crime.
The friar is one of roughly ten naturalized citizens named in this particular round of Justice Department denaturalization filings, a group that also includes people convicted of fraud and drug trafficking. That context matters: this is not an isolated action tailored to one clergy abuse case, but part of a broader federal enforcement effort aimed at naturalized citizens with serious criminal records.
Church officials removed the friar from ministry after the allegations became known in 2018, one year after he became a citizen. That internal removal, his 2019 and 2021 criminal convictions, and now a federal denaturalization complaint together illustrate how a single set of underlying facts can generate distinct proceedings across different systems and years.
Revoking someone's citizenship does not compensate the people he harmed, and it does not resolve any separate civil claim a survivor might bring against the parish, the religious order, or the archdiocese that assigned and supervised him. If a court grants the request, he would generally revert to whatever immigration status he held before naturalizing, which could lead to separate removal proceedings later, a further step beyond denaturalization itself.
For survivors and their attorneys, a federal filing like this one can still be useful indirectly. It lays out a documented timeline of the friar's conduct and the institution's knowledge that could inform how a related civil claim describes what the parish or religious order knew and when, even though the two proceedings remain entirely separate as a legal matter.
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A federal action aimed at citizenship status is easy to confuse with a survivor's path to compensation. Here is how the two actually relate.
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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, misrepresentation, or concealment.
No. Denaturalization is a distinct legal action focused on citizenship status and does not modify an existing criminal sentence, which continues on its own separate track.
Not directly. It does not create or resolve any civil claim for damages, though the factual record a denaturalization complaint produces can sometimes be useful background for a survivor's own separate lawsuit.
Yes. A civil claim against an institution for negligent supervision or related theories is a separate legal path that does not depend on, or wait for, the outcome of a federal denaturalization case.