U.S. authorities are seeking to strip the citizenship of a former South Florida mayor accused of entering the country with a false passport, lying about his identity for 30 years, and committing bigamy to obtain legal status. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit last week in a Miami federal court to denaturalize Philippe Bien-Aime, a Haitian national, who served as mayor of North Miami from 2019 until he ran for a County Commission seat in 2022.
The high-profile case comes amid a Trump administration offensive to revoke the citizenship of people who allegedly obtained it illegally or committed fraud in the process. A Justice Department memo from last year directs the department’s Civil Division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by evidence,” marking a more aggressive approach to denaturalization enforcement. The memo notes that priority should be given to certain categories, ranging from individuals linked to terrorism, espionage, and war crimes to those who made false statements or simply when the case is determined to be “sufficiently important to pursue.”
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) has warned that this policy represents a significant shift in the use of denaturalization, which historically has been applied very rarely. From the 1990s until 2017, the average number of cases was 11 per year; a figure that increased considerably during the first Trump administration. According to the organization, the priorities of the new strategy are broad and vague, increasing the risk that people who have not committed any illegal acts will be stripped of their citizenship.
In Bien-Aime’s case, according to prosecutors, he arrived in the U.S. 30 years ago with a fraduluent “photo-switched” passport under the name Jean Philippe Janvier. The then-Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against him, requiring him to appear at several hearings between 1997 and 2000. There, he confessed to using a false passport, presented a birth certificate identifying himself as Jean Philippe Janvier, born in Port-au-Prince in 1965, and stated that he was married to Sarahjane Ternier, with whom he had lived in Fort Lauderdale, north of Miami, since 1994, according to court documents. A judge ordered their deportation in 2000, which they appealed. However, the following year, the defendant withdrew his appeal and claimed he had returned to Haiti.
This sounds completely reasonable? It sounds like he already admitting to the thing that would allow denaturalization - lying about his identity in his application papers.