A citizenship revocation case has been filed against Hassan Shergill Khan
The US Justice Department is seeking to strip a Pakistani-born doctor jailed for sexually exploiting a young girl of his citizenship.A citizenship revocation case was filed against Hassan Shergill Khan on Thursday.
He is a former doctor who has been imprisoned since 2016, according to the New York Post. “U.S. naturalization and citizenship will not protect sexual predators from the consequences of their horrific actions,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in a statement.“If you fail to disclose serious crimes while seeking citizenship, the government will discover your lies and revoke your illegally obtained U.S. citizenship,” they added.Khan, now 38, applied for U.S. citizenship in August 2012. Court records indicate that a few months earlier he traveled from New York to London, where he engaged in sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl, whom he had allegedly been luring since she was 11 years old. He knew the victim was a minor and repeatedly forced her to send explicit photos and engage in sex acts via live video, prosecutors said.He was arrested in September 2015, two years after becoming a US citizen, and later pleaded guilty to coercion and enticement of a minor.
In 2016, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison.At the sentencing, the victim spoke of the long-term damage caused by the abuse, saying it had left her suffering from depression, hallucinations and anorexia. She also said she hurt herself, fell behind in school, and turned into a “shadow of the person I could have been.”The Justice Department claims Khan should never have been granted citizenship because he “intentionally misrepresented and concealed the criminal conduct” he engaged in during the naturalization process.
Prosecutors also say he failed to meet “good moral character” requirements.This case comes as the Trump administration pushes citizenship removal efforts. A memorandum issued last June said that the authorities would “prioritize and pursue denationalization procedures to the fullest extent” against individuals convicted of serious crimes, including sexual crimes.According to officials, about 384 such cases have been filed in recent years, a sharp rise compared to previous decades. Between 1990 and 2018, only 305 cases were filed.“The Department of Justice is intensely focused on rooting out criminal aliens who defraud the naturalization process,” Justice Department spokesman Matthew Tragesser said.
