# Talk:Fedorenko v. United States


### Fedorenko v. United States
This is going to be my first court case article that I'm taking to FAC, and I'm currently working on making the prose more accessible and fleshing out a few things I've missed (but still point things out if you see them). While I'm on that, if anyone has items for me to incorporate, I'd really appreciate the guidance! Thanks :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 00:32, 7 September 2025 (UTC)


### ViridianPenguin
Hi Claudia, I'm a first-year law student too, and this was a fun one to read, especially given all the hubbub around immigration law right now! I've made grammar edits where they seemed clearly needed, so here are my remaining suggestions:
Third, the district court held that under the rules of equity, it had the power to rule for Fedorenko anyway because of his record of a quiet life in the U.S.; the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that if citizenship is gained illegally, it has to be revoked no matter what. A private person discovering that someone gained citizenship by concealment of a material fact does not force the government to initiate revocation proceedings; it only allows the government to do so. Accordingly, the portion after the semicolon should read along the lines of "the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that if citizenship is gained illegally, the government has the power to revoke it in all cases."
Justice Harry Blackmun concurred with the decision, but argued that the Court should have applied Chaunt to the case; Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, arguing against the Court's interpretation of duress; and Justice Byron White also dissented, arguing that the Court should have clarified Chaunt and remanded the case back to the appeals court to review the district court's findings. This serial list should probably be split into three separate sentences since rather than three people doing separate things, it is one justice concurring and two dissenting, albeit for different reasons. While this change is not required, that imbalance between Blackmun vs Stevens and White breaks the three-item list in my mind.
As early as 1964, Fedorenko's name was on a list of 59 suspected war criminals compiled by Dr. Otto Karbach. Per MOS:DOCTOR, this sentence should simply refer to the list compiler as Otto Karbach.
As a part of this power, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed the government to revoke a person's citizenship in cases of fraud or where the citizenship was "illegally procured", a process called denaturalization. To clarify that the "process called denaturalization" refers to revocation, not illegal procurement, I suggest rephrasing to "Using this power, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1906, which gave the federal government the denaturalization authority to revoke a person's citizenship in cases of fraud or where the citizenship was 'illegally procured'".
Rossi was also one case where the court extended the definition of materiality to visa applications, not just citizenship cases, which courts did consistently at the time. For clarity on which court decided Rossi, rephrase to "Whereas courts consistently applied the materiality standard in citizenship cases, the Ninth Circuit's application of this test to visa applications in Rossi was unique."
Justice Harry Blackmun concurred, but said that the majority should have applied Chaunt to the case because he thought that facts used to distinguish Chaunt were immaterial. Since "material fact" is the legal standard being repeatedly discussed in this article, this use of "immaterial" to discuss a distinction without a difference may confuse the reader. Perhaps "insignificant" would work?
Hope this helps! Ping me when this is at FAC, and I will be sure to support! ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 17:04, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
@ViridianPenguin: Thank you so much! I've done all of these except the second-to-last point; I actually meant it in the opposite of the way you interpreted, so I rephrased it to clarify that. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 19:34, 15 September 2025 (UTC)


### lethargilistic
@Theleekycauldron Just glancing at it for now.
Per MOS:INSTITUTION, "court" should not be capitalized when referring to SCOTUS as just that.
Because the Naturalization Act was meant to help courts address a pervasive problem of procedural defects and outright frauds, courts erred on the side of ordering denaturalization even for minor errors.  This strikes as not neutral in two ways. First, that lying on a citizenship application is in itself morally wrong. Second, that strictly construing defects against the validity of applications was a reasonable response by courts to this perceived problem. I know this article in particular is about a Nazi collaborator, but these sorts of laws were not typically used against unsympathetic people. They were typically used against ordinary immigrants who were not perceived as white and who had the audacity to immigrate during and after a huge wave of anti-immigrant sentiment towards the end of the 19th century. So, rather than discussing this as "helping" or "problems," I think a flatter explanation that judges strictly construed citizenship documents because they considered that a requirement of the Naturalization Acts would be better.
Somewhat following from that, and I don't have a pullquote for this, but I got the impression from the prose that the case was a foregone conclusion at points. That is, that he *should* have been denaturalized. This can be hard to avoid because sources often do this to mythologize or accentuate decisions' reasonableness ex ante, but it should be avoided. SCOTUS is making political decisions, not revealing pre-ordained truths.
I'm also curious about this case's effects, if any, on later denaturalization cases where the respondent was not guilty of war crimes. A decision that duress is not available to war criminals, read narrowly, sounds fine. But I would not be even slightly surprised if this case was later read for the proposition that, say, someone identified by the state as a gang member or cartel member cannot rely on duress as a defense either. Whether or not that's right would be more contentious, at least. I'm not saying "do OR." I'm asking "are there any sources about this case being used in the cases of people who aren't war criminals?"
In one case, the Supreme Court ordered denaturalization for not including a certificate of lawful arrival with the application for citizenship (it was delayed in the mail); in another,[...] Identify these cases, even if it's just a hat note. lethargilistic (talk) 17:46, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
Addressing each point as another peer reviewer, I have gone ahead with replacing all instances of "the Court" with "the court." I disagree with the second point, as "procedural defects and outright frauds" clearly differentiates lies by whether they were done with an intent to deceive. Referring to federal courts as erring on the side of revocation clearly implies that some people were swept up who arguably should not have been. All the more, the Binder 1982 source reads "Because the aim of the 1906 legislation was to deal with extensive frauds and irregularities, the courts generally were predisposed toward permitting denaturalization" (p. 135). Thus, the current phrasing has strong WP:text-source integrity.
I also disagree with the third point, as the article maintains its neutrality by thoroughly presenting the dissenters' arguments and showcases significant academic criticism. Hatnote b even detracts from the mythology of a bumbling special litigation unit transferring its work to the DOJ Office of Special Investigations that notched successive Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court victories. As for the fourth point, the only case to consider Fedorenko's applicability to gang/cartel crime is Herrera-Elias v. Garland, 96 F.4th 1040 (8th Cir. 2024), a case rejecting a duress claim for someone claiming that their childhood drug crimes for MS-13 were involuntary and committed under duress. That case's footnote 2 begins: The persecutor bar denies withholding of removal if “the alien ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of an individual because of the individual's race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(B)(i). “[W]hether coercion or duress is relevant in determining if an alien assisted or otherwise participated in persecution” is an issue that has generated extensive litigation for many years and still is not fully resolved. Negusie v. Holder, 555 U.S. 511, 517, 129 S.Ct. 1159, 173 L.Ed.2d 20 (2009); see Fedorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490, 101 S.Ct. 737, 66 L.Ed.2d 686 (1981)." This year's edition of Law of Asylum in the United States ties both cases together, so I can handle incorporating this info into the article. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 19:17, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
As for the fifth point, I have gone ahead with identifying the SCOTUS cases as redlinks in the body. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 19:28, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
"[P]rocedural defects and outright frauds" clearly differentiates lies by whether they were done with an intent to deceive. There are legitimate reasons to lie on those things, so that's not a justification for the current wording, IMO. Not everybody is hiding that they are a war criminal. Is a transgender woman doing something morally wrong when they assert that they are a man to get inside the border? Nah. Is it intentional deception? For sure. While I agree that the current wording is analytically close to the source (TSI is irrelevant because it's about physical proximity), I don't think that one guy's assertion that the goal of immigration legislation in (checks notes) 1906 (or any immigration legislation, really) was to "deal with extensive frauds and irregularities" is particularly noteworthy or reliable. It invites a big ol' "to what end?" that is never addressed because it's not actually relevant here. There is obviously a level of "the state is, in fact, executing this system, and thus we must cover what is happening because we can't hedge on every little thing" but that doesn't stretch to justifying an uncritical assertion that a tightening of immigration law in that timeframe was, in fact, about procedural integrity in and of itself. I just think there's a version of this article that doesn't overly legitimize immigration procedure with extraneous statements like this, tbh.
Somewhat fun news on this point. I was fascinated by how the hell United States v. Ginsberg even happened, so I read the briefing. In it, they describe a specific incident that inspired the Act of 1906. Before the Act, Naturalization hearings were informal ex parte motions by the applicants that did not have any notice requirement to the government and did not provide the government with a right to intervene in the hearings. The "fraud" that prompted the law was not done by the people applying for citizenship. Politicians in St. Louis corralled a bunch of immigrants into a court and intentionally put them through a Naturalization process that was not competent to actually grant them citizenship. WILD. Apparently this is described in more detail in Dolan v. United States and Barrett v. United States, 133 Fed. 440. In response, to be sure that the processes would be done by competent courts, the Act of 1906 turned Naturalization hearings into something more like a formal civil hearing. Will be looking for more information about this and might find a proper secondary source that would firmly justify the "fraud" language while servicing the critical reading I gave it earlier. lethargilistic (talk) 21:22, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
My rabbitholing turned up a good source, the Peter J. Spiro one. I don't know how to use the abbreviated citation templates that you did in this article, though. ^^; lethargilistic (talk) 21:17, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
The alleged incompetence of the government's trial team is a great example of where the article kinda presumes what the outcome should have been, actually. The government, however, proved to be wholly unprepared for trial; it had located no domestic witnesses, had not prepared the witnesses it did have for trial, did not interview its elderly witnesses (instead hoping that they would survive long enough to take the stand in court), and was not familiar with court standards for photographic identification. Saying that the government lost due to an overall, abstract unpreparedness makes the government the protagonist of the trial process and implies that proper outcome of the trial court case ought to have been a decision in the government's favor. This is not at all clear at that point, before the Supreme Court decided the question that reached it. I mean, the exclusion of the eyewitness identifications from consideration was a huge win for the defense and wasn't even particularly controversial as a constitutional matter. Presenting witnesses with an unconstitutional six-pack to identify the defendant is obviously deeply inappropriate (albeit common), but it isn't "unpreparedness." I dunno, it's not exactly typical to call out the trial court team as incompetent (even when extremely true), so it kinda prompts the question in me "Who needs them to have been incompetent?" And, not always but often, the answer to that question is "people who think this case should have been decided differently at the trial court level." For inclusion in Wikipedia, the clear answer ought to be something other than that. And, without a clear answer other than that, I don't see why including incompetence as a narrative thread is pertinent, really.
lethargilistic (talk) 20:20, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
The article skims over the Treblinka extermination camp bit in one sentence buried within a paragraph. Because that episode is what the case is about, the atrocities there should be introduced at that point regardless of what can be said directly  about Federeko's activities there. lethargilistic (talk) 20:43, 8 September 2025 (UTC)