The Justice Department has moved to strip U.S. citizenship from a Nigerian-born man convicted of fraud whose sentence was commuted by President Biden.
The department filed a civil denaturalization complaint in U.S. District Court in Baltimore against Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, a Nigerian native who organized a sprawling conspiracy to steal identities and file fraudulent tax returns, according to the Justice Department.
Kazeem was convicted in 2017 on 19 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. On Dec. 12, 2024, then-President Joe Biden commuted his sentence after he had served about six years — one of nearly 1,500 commutations granted to individuals who had been serving under house arrest following pandemic-era prison releases.
“The Trump Administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain the U.S. citizenship that they were never entitled to in the first place,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in a statement.
The new complaint alleges Kazeem committed fraud before and after his naturalization and concealed those crimes, disqualifying him from having obtained citizenship lawfully. The department also alleges that prior to the tax fraud scheme, Kazeem entered into a sham marriage to obtain permanent resident status and then married a second woman, further disqualifying him from naturalization.
The scale of the underlying scheme was extensive. According to court documents and evidence presented at Kazeem’s criminal trial, he purchased more than 91,000 stolen identities from a Vietnamese hacker who had obtained them from an Oregon company’s private database used to conduct pre-employment and volunteer background checks. In total, conspirators possessed stolen personal identifying information for more than 259,000 victims, which was used to file fraudulent tax returns between 2012 and 2015.
Kazeem was linked to 10,139 fraudulent federal tax returns seeking more than $91 million in refunds, of which over $11.6 million was successfully obtained, the Justice Department said. At least 2,000 wire transfers totaling more than $2.1 million were sent to Nigeria.
He used proceeds from the scheme to make a nearly $200,000 down payment on a newly constructed Maryland home, purchase a $175,000 townhouse, and attempt to develop a $6 million, four-star hotel in Lagos, Nigeria, prosecutors said.
The denaturalization case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and will be litigated by the Affirmative Litigation Unit of the Civil Division’s Office of Immigration Litigation, the Justice Department said.
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