The Justice Department moved Thursday to yank the US citizenship of a disgraced Pakistani-born Long Island doctor convicted of sexually exploiting an 11-year-old girl.
The denaturalization case against Hassan Sherjil Khan, who has been behind bars since 2016, was filed by US Attorney Jay Clayton in the Southern District of New York, and it’s one of more than 300 proceedings the Trump administration has pushed as part of a crackdown on criminal foreign nationals that obtained citizenship.
“Naturalization and US citizenship will not protect sexual predators from the consequences of their horrific acts,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in a statement.
“If you fail to disclose serious crimes while seeking naturalization, the government will discover your lies and revoke your ill-gotten US citizenship.”
Khan, 38, applied for US citizenship in August 2012 – just four months after he traveled from New York to London to have sex with a 15-year-old girl “he had been sexually grooming from the time she was eleven,” according to court documents.
In the years leading up to the UK trip – during which Khan engaged in various sex acts with the teen on “several occasions over multiple days” – the discredited Mineola doctor was fully aware his victim was a minor and “continually coerced and enticed her to send him sexually explicit images of herself and to engage in sexually explicit conduct via live video chats,” prosecutors said.
Khan was arrested in September 2015, two years after he took the oath of allegiance to the US and obtained citizenship.
In 2016, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison after pleading guilty to coercion and enticement of a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity.
At his sentencing, Khan’s victim described how the grooming and abuse left her bedridden with depression, triggered hallucinations and anorexia, caused her to self harm, made her fall behind in school, and left her “a shadow of the person that I could have been.”
The denaturalization complaint against Khan alleges that he illegally obtained US citizenship because he “willfully misrepresented and concealed the criminal conduct” he engaged in – but had not yet been arrested for – during his naturalization proceedings.
Prosecutors also argued Khan lacked the “good moral character” required for naturalization because he had committed a crime involving “moral turpitude.”
A DOJ memo issued last June noted the department would “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” against individuals convicted of engaging in 10 categories of crimes, including sex offenses.
The Trump administration has filed roughly 384 denaturalization cases, according to the New York Times, a massive increase from prior administrations.
Between 1990 and 2018, the government brought just 305 denaturalization cases, Washington Post reported.
“The Department of Justice is laser-focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process,” DOJ spokesman Matthew Tragesser told The Post.
“Under the leadership of President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department is pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history.”
Tragesser said the DOJ is “moving at warp speed to ensure fraudsters are held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent.”
“Our filed referrals in one year have exceeded the total during the entire four years of the Biden administration,” he added, “with many more to come.”