WASHINGTON, June 8 -- For most of the people who raise their right hand and take the oath, the certificate that follows has felt final. The Justice Department spent three decades treating it that way, filing an average of about eleven cases a year to undo a naturalization. On Monday it moved to revoke the citizenship of seventeen people at once, and called it the largest denaturalization effort in the country's history.

The announcement is at once narrower and larger than it sounds. Narrower, because many of the seventeen were convicted of grave crimes and would draw little public sympathy. Larger, because the administration has said it wants to run denaturalization at a scale the country has never attempted, between 100 and 200 cases a ...