Although the statute’s text does not reference a “materiality” requirement, the government is required to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the underlying illegal act “played a role” in procurement of naturalization.222 MATERIALITY REQUIREMENT IN CRIMINAL DENATURALIZATION The criminal statute does not specify whether materiality is required for conviction, and federal courts were divided on this point until 2017.223 The Supreme Court attempted to resolve the divide in Maslenjak v. United States (2017), which involved an ethnic Serb who lived in Bosnia during the civil war of the 1990s. In 1998, Divna Maslenjak and her family sought refugee status in the United States. Under oath, she misrepresented her husband’s involvement in the war, not disclosing that he had served as an officer in the brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army that participated in the Srebrenica massacre—a slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians. Swearing that she had never given false information to a government official while applying for an immigration benefit, Maslenjak naturalized before this was discovered by the U.S. government. Upon discovery, she was charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1425 (a) for procuring citizenship “illegally.” According to the government, in the course of procuring naturalization, she broke another law, 18 U.S.C. § 1015(a), which prohibits making a false statement under oath in a naturalization proceeding. The Supreme Court ultimately determined that her false statements must have influenced the decision to approve her naturalization application in order to result in a conviction for unlawful procurement of naturalization. The alleged illegal actions “must have somehow contributed to the obtaining of citizenship”224—that is, it must have been material in the granting of citizenship. Delivering the opinion for the court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: If whatever illegal conduct occurring within the naturalization process was a causal dead-end—if, so to speak, the ripples from that act could not have reached the decision to award citizenship—then the act cannot support a charge that the applicant obtained naturalization illegally. The conduct, though itself illegal, would not also make the obtaining of citizenship so. To get citizenship unlawfully, we understand, is to get it through an unlawful means—and that is just to say that an illegality played some role in its acquisition.225 II. Denaturalization: A Radical Measure in the Hands of Zealots 57