U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter is asking immigration authorities to audit citizenship approvals issued during the Biden administration and trigger denaturalization proceedings against people who may have committed fraud to become U.S. citizens.
The St. Simons Island Republican and U.S. Senate hopeful is issuing his request via a letter sent Wednesday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
The letter comes in the wake of a DeKalb County shooting spree that left three people, including a DHS employee, dead earlier this month.
The man arrested in connection with the killings, Olaolukitan Adon Abel, 26, was born in the United Kingdom and became a naturalized citizen in 2022, according to DHS.
Abel died Tuesday night in the DeKalb County Jail. A cause of death has not yet been determined, but the sheriff’s office said it didn’t find any indication of foul play.
Referencing Abel’s case in his letter to the agency, Carter writes that “warning signs” may have been missed during the adjudication of his citizenship application.
“Congress has a responsibility to determine whether this was an isolated failure or evidence of broader weaknesses in the naturalization system,” he added.
A spokesperson for Carter declined to comment on Abel’s death.
In a public statement following the DeKalb County shootings, Mullin also remarked on Abel having become a naturalized U.S. citizen during the Biden administration.
“Since President Trump took office, (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS sub-agency in charge of administering lawful immigration) has implemented measures to ensure individuals with criminal histories and who otherwise lack good moral character do not attain citizenship.”
As part of the naturalization process, immigrants must attest that they have not committed crimes to satisfy what is known as the “good moral character” requirement laid out in immigration law. Misrepresenting oneself in a citizenship application can eventually result in citizenship being stripped — as well as criminal prosecution.
Abel had already received criminal convictions in Savannah and in California before his alleged role in the DeKalb shootings. Those convictions came after he became a U.S. citizen, court records show. Before that, he was a member of the U.S. Navy.
Wednesday’s letter is not the first time Carter, who is locked in a three-way Republican race to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, has requested increased immigration enforcement from Trump officials.
Late last year, he asked Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, to surge Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in metro Atlanta. That request was not fulfilled.
In his latest letter, Carter noted that naturalizations reached a high mark during the Biden years.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, the Biden administration is estimated to have naturalized nearly 3.5 million immigrants, the most in any single presidential term.
“Those numbers alone warrant serious oversight to ensure that speed and scale did not come at the expense of proper vetting, public safety, and the integrity of American citizenship,” Carter wrote.
Stripping away a naturalized citizen’s citizenship has historically been a rare occurrence. Between 1990 and 2017, federal authorities filed 305 denaturalization cases in total, an average of 11 per year. During the first Trump administration, there were over 100 denaturalization filings, compared to 24 under Biden.
Under federal law, proof of fraud during the citizenship application process is generally the only infraction that can lead to denaturalization, which begins with USCIS flagging suspect cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Last year, both DOJ and USCIS issued intra-agency directives meant to boost denaturalization proceedings.
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