The United States Department of Justice filed a civil complaint at the US District Court in Baltimore, Maryland on Wednesday March 18, 2026, seeking to revoke the citizenship of Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem over his role in a massive identity theft and tax fraud scheme that targeted over 259,000 victims and attempted to steal more than $91 million from the Internal Revenue Service.
Kazeem was previously convicted in 2017 on 19 counts including mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His sentence was however commuted in December 2024 by then President Joe Biden after serving only about six years, one of nearly 1,500 commutations Biden granted as he prepared to leave office.
The Trump administration has now moved to ensure that act of clemency does not translate into a permanent free pass.
“The Trump Administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain the U.S. citizenship that they were never entitled to in the first place,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “U.S. Citizenship is a privilege, and we will continue to ask courts to revoke a status that was obtained through fraud and deceit.”
In total Kazeem was linked to 10,139 fraudulent federal tax returns seeking over $91 million in refunds, of which more than $11.6 million was successfully obtained.
The denaturalisation complaint rests on two separate legal grounds. The first is that Kazeem committed extensive fraud both before and after his naturalisation and deliberately concealed those crimes disqualifying him from having obtained citizenship lawfully in the first place.
The second is that prior to his fraud scheme he entered into a sham marriage to secure permanent resident status and later married a second woman, a conduct that independently disqualified him from naturalisation under US immigration law.
The denaturalisation case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and is being litigated by the Affirmative Litigation Unit of the Civil Division’s Office of Immigration Litigation. If the lawsuit succeeds Kazeem will lose his American citizenship.
