Arizona Attorney - December 2012

Renouncing U.S. Citizenship

sumption that a U.S. citizen intends to retain citizenship when she performs some of the acts listed in INA Section 349, such as naturalizing in a foreign state, accepting non-policy-level employment with a foreign state, or subscribing to a routine oath of allegiance to a foreign state. 24

If the U.S. citizen has performed any of the potentially expatriating acts, such as acquiring another citizenship, and in doing so intended to relinquish citizenship, she may appear before a U.S. consular officer to document this fact. The former citizen will fill out a form and sign a voluntary relinquishment statement. 25 If the Department of State approves the finding that the former U.S. citizen had relinquished citizenship, the Department issues a Certificate of Loss of Nationality (“CLN”), which is sent to the former U.S. citizen, together with that person’s cancelled U.S. passport. 26 The CLN will state that citizenship was lost at the time the expatriating act was performed.

U.S. authorities do not always let the citizen leave easily, as demonstrated by one of our recent cases. Our client was born in the United States while his parents, both British, were in graduate school. He left the United States at the age of 5 months and returned with his parents to Britain. As an adult, he never renewed the U.S. passport his parents had obtained for him.

While studying at Cambridge, he joined the University’s Royal Naval Reserve unit as a midshipman—the lowest commissioned officer post. (Serving as a commissioned or non-commissioned officer in the armed forces of a foreign state is one of the acts specified in INA § 349(a) as a potentially expatriating act. Notably, it is not one of the acts as to which the administrative presumption of intent to retain citizenship applies.) Believing that he had thereby abandoned his U.S. citizenship, he thereafter behaved consistently with the belief that he was no longer a U.S. citizen. He did not file U.S. tax returns, never voted in a U.S. election, did not hold a U.S. passport, and in fact travelled a total of 22 times to the United States on his U.K. passport. 27 In 2011, fearing that the United States might still consider him a citizen, he applied to formalize his relinquishment of U.S. citizenship as of the date more than

10 years earlier on which he joined the Royal Naval Reserve.

After a brief telephone interview, the
consular officer denied his application to
document his expatriation, stating that
midshipman was not an officer position. We
challenged this administratively and finally,
several months later, received the following
e-mail from the Department of State,
which sets out the Department’s method
for analyzing these cases:
in the United States and assuming that
you can confirm his use of a UK pass-
port to enter the United States, he has
established by the preponderance of
the evidence, as required by INA
Section 349(b), that he has expatriated
himself by virtue of his service as a
non-commissioned officer in the
British Navy. In sum, it appears that []
has voluntarily committed a statutory
act of expatriation with the intention
of relinquishing his U.S. citizenship.

It appears that you have documentation from the British Navy confirming that [] was in fact a non-commissioned officer. Service as such is a threshold statutory act of expatriation (INA Section 349(a)( 3)(B)). Section 349(b) of the INA presumes that he acted voluntarily. The only issue that must be addressed is one of intent. According to [State Department records], []’s last passport expired in 1990 [more than 20 years from the date of the e-mail].

Given the fact that he has not voted
He was then allowed to go to the Embassy
in early 2012 and document that he had
relinquished his citizenship as of the date
almost 14 years earlier when he had joined
the Royal Naval Reserve.