inconsistencies of any nature. There may be non-public criteria in effect under Operation Second Look as well, but the public communication from the administration has done nothing to allay concerns that even the slightest error could result in a federal denaturalization case. Operation Second Look In January 2018, USCIS stated that it had “dedicated a team to review these Operation Janus cases, and the agency has stated its intention to refer approximately an additional 1,600 for prosecution.”290 This successor DHS operation, overseen by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, is named Operation Second Look (OSL). The aim of OSL is “to address leads received from Operation Janus” and to review “an estimated 700,000 remaining alien files,”291 a figure much higher than the 315,000 generated under Janus. There are no details on deadlines or procedures for these reviews or prosecutions. In June 2018, then USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna stated that a new office in Los Angeles will be running by 2019, but that investigating and referring cases will take longer.292 Cissna stated that, “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place.” He went on: “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”293 In remarks made in October 2018, Cissna, stated that since January 2017, USCIS had identified approximately 2,500 cases requiring review, and that as of August 31, 2018, it had referred more than a 110 of those cases to DOJ for civil denaturalization, noting that six individuals “received a final denaturalization court order based on that work.”294 In response to widespread public reporting, he erroneously and misleadingly assured the audience that “[t]here is no denaturalization task force. I don’t know how many times I repeat that—there’s press in the room—for the ten thousandth time, there’s no denaturalization task force. This is a group of adjudicators, rather officers and lawyers, who are looking at the cases that were identified by ICE of people who illegally entered the country, got deported, and then illegally entered again under a fake identity and then years later lied to get citizenship. It is appropriate and correct that those people be denaturalized.”295 It is not publicly known how many of the 2,500 cases Cissna referred to have been reviewed, aside from the 110 referred for civil proceedings. The DOJ’s Civil Division, in March 2019, cited 54 further referrals in the first two months of 2019 alone.296 Even 110 civil proceedings would represent a nearly ten-fold increase over the average number of civil denaturalizations filed since 1972, according to data analyzed by the Justice Initiative. Given the intensive resources required to investigate and initiate proceedings, significant mobilization within the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security would be required in order to realize these goals. It is unclear how many of those referred were declined by DOJ and not pursued. According to the Justice Initiative’s research, 66 civil cases were filed between 2017 II. Denaturalization: A Radical Measure in the Hands of Zealots 69