Stripped of citizenship, Indian faces deportation from US

Singh arrived at San Francisco International Airport in 1991 without any travel documents or proof of identity

In a first-of-its-kind case, the US has revoked the American citizenship of an Indian native, who, authorities said, acquired it by fraud.

Baljinder Singh alias Davinder Singh, 43, who married a US citizen, has now been reverted to the Green Card status which leaves him potentially subject to removal proceedings at the Department of Homeland Security's discretion, the Justice Department said.

The Department of Justice, which moved a petition in this regard before a US court last September, said that Singh in his citizenship application concealed prior orders of exclusion and his deportation under different identities than the identity under which they naturalised.

"Singh's denaturalisation is the first arising out of a growing body of cases referred to the Department of Justice by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as part of Operation Janus," the Department of Justice said in a statement.

A US District Court in New Jersey on January 5 had entered an order revoking his naturalised US citizenship and canceling his Certificate of Naturalisation.

Under Operation Janus, the Department of Homeland Security has identified about 315,000 cases where some fingerprint data was missing from the centralised digital fingerprint repository.

Among those cases, some may have sought to circumvent criminal record and other background checks in the naturalisation process, feels the Department of Homeland Security.

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