Nigerian Woman With US Passport for 24 Years Is Denaturalized by Trump Administration
A Nigerian woman who held United States citizenship for more than thirteen years has been denaturalized by a federal judge in California, who revoked her 2013 naturalization under a consent judgment entered in a Justice Department lawsuit accusing her of concealing a passport fraud that began in 1992. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the Northern District of California signed the order against Vivian Chike Obichere on October 13, 2026.
The judgment revokes Obichere’s June 2013 naturalization and makes the revocation effective June 19, 2013. The revocation is retroactive to the date the naturalization occurred. Under the terms of the order, she must surrender her naturalization certificate and her US passports.
According to the Department of Justice, Obichere obtained a US passport in 1992 using the name, Social Security number, birthplace and birth date of a US citizen identified in court filings only as C.C.O. The department said she renewed that passport in 2002.
DOJ said Obichere became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in 2003 under her real identity, more than a decade after the passport issued under the other citizen’s identity was first obtained. In 2012, according to the department, she attempted to renew the passport issued under the C.C.O. identity at the same time she was applying for US citizenship under her real name.
The conduct described in the government’s filings spans more than two decades, from the 1992 passport application under the C.C.O. identity, through its 2002 renewal, to the 2012 attempt to renew it again while a naturalization application under her real name was pending.
The Justice Department said Obichere testified under oath at her naturalization interview, the interview that preceded the grant of citizenship, that she had never used the name C.C.O. She was convicted in 2015 of False Statement in Application and Use of Passport.
The government filed its civil denaturalization complaint against Obichere on July 30, 2026. The complaint raised four counts. She agreed to the entry of judgment on one of them, and the court dismissed the other three without deciding them.
Because the case ended by consent judgment, the denaturalization took effect through Obichere’s agreement rather than after a contested trial, and the dismissed counts were closed without findings on their merits. The ruling does not decide Obichere’s green card status, and it does not determine whether she will be removed from the United States.
The Justice Department announced the case alongside a separate denaturalization action in Florida involving Cuban-born Milagros Marileisis Acosta Torres. DOJ said Acosta Torres was naturalized in 2015 and concealed a 2020 federal conviction tied to a tribal casino fraud laundering scheme. Both denaturalizations were announced in the same department release, and Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate announced the two rulings.
Denaturalization suits are civil cases, filed by the Justice Department in federal district courts, in which the government asks a judge to cancel a certificate of naturalization on the ground that citizenship was procured unlawfully. In Obichere’s case, the consent judgment canceled her citizenship, but the court did not rule on her lawful permanent resident status or order her removal.
The number of such cases has grown sharply this year. Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows at least 185 denaturalization cases were filed in the first ten months of 2026, covering the period from January through October. That total already exceeds the roughly 125 cases filed nationwide over the entire period from 2008 to 2025.
