The Justice Department announced Thursday that it has secured the denaturalization of two criminals “who obtained U.S. citizenship through fraud” and sued to revoke the citizenship of a third who carried out marriage fraud.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the actions “reflect this Department of Justice’s ongoing efforts to strip citizenship from people who conceal crimes or defraud the American people during the immigration process.”
“American citizenship is a sacred privilege — not a cheap status that can be obtained dishonestly,” she added.
The three individuals were identified as Ukraine native Vladimir Volgaev, Cuba native Mirelys Cabrera Diaz and Lebanon native Alec Nasreddine Kassir.
The Justice Department said Volgaev, whose denaturalization was secured on Monday, “concealed and misrepresented his involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle over a thousand firearms components out of the United States and ship them to foreign markets.”
“This case sends a clear message,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in a statement. “The United States provided Volgaev with safety, housing, and citizenship, and he returned those gains with malice, including by defrauding one of the federal agencies that provided him benefits. We will not reward this kind of behavior by allowing such an individual to retain U.S. citizenship that should not have been granted in the first place.”
The Justice Department said a federal court convicted Volgaev “of Smuggling Goods from the United States and Theft of Government Money or Property in 2020, after he had naturalized as a U.S. citizen on January 11, 2016.”
Cabrera Diaz, a resident of Hialeah, Florida, “illegally procured her citizenship because she committed unlawful acts — namely a health care fraud conspiracy — before she naturalized that disqualified her from United States citizenship,” according to the Justice Department.
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“In 2019, Cabrera Diaz, then 42, was convicted in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida of conspiring to commit health care fraud. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 29 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution of over $6 million,” it said. “When she pleaded guilty, she admitted that she willfully conspired to commit health care fraud in the years before she became a United States citizen. She specifically admitted that, between August 2011 and March 2014, she and her co-conspirators paid kickbacks to patient recruiters for referring fraudulent prescriptions to the pharmacy where she worked. She admitted to maintaining a log of how much money was owed to each recruiter for fraudulent prescriptions.”
The Justice Department also said Thursday that it sued to revoke the citizenship of Kassir, who lives in Miami, Florida.
“Kassir falsely represented that he had been living with a U.S. citizen spouse, during the three years immediately preceding the filing of his naturalization application in March 2010,” it added.
“On November 14, 2018, he pleaded guilty to passport fraud… Specifically, he admitted that he was not living in marital union — or even in the same state — with his purported U.S. citizen spouse; rather, but they separated in 2009 and Kassir moved to Florida,” it also said.
Fox News’ Jake Gibson contributed to this report.
