In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 18-2789 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ELEAZAR CORRAL VALENZUELA, Defendant-Appellant. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 1:17-cv-08423 — Matthew F. Kennelly, Judge. ____________________ ARGUED APRIL 15, 2019 — DECIDED JULY 26, 2019 ____________________ Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and BAUER and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge. Seventeen years after Eleazar Corral Valenzuela (Corral) was convicted of aggravated criminal sex- ual abuse of a minor family member in Illinois state court, the United States filed a civil complaint to revoke his naturalized citizenship and cancel his certificate of naturalization. 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). The district court granted the government judgment 2 No. 18-2789 on the pleadings, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c), after dismissing Cor- ral’s affirmative defenses. We affirm. I Corral, a native of Mexico, was admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident in 1994. In January 1999, he applied for naturalization, and he became a United States citizen in June 2000. Shortly after, a grand jury in Kane County, Illinois in- dicted Corral on seven counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Less than five months after becoming a United States citizen, Corral pleaded guilty to one count of the indictment, which charged: On or about June 9, 1998 through February 26, 2000, Eleazar Corral committed the offense of Aggravated Criminal Sexual Abuse, Class 2 Felony in violation of Chapter 720, Section 5/12-16(b) of the Illinois Compiled Statutes, as amended, in that said defend- ant committed an act of sexual conduct with [re- dacted] in that the defendant knowingly touched the vagina of [redacted] for the purpose of the sexual gratification of the defendant. Corral was convicted under Illinois’s aggravated criminal sexual abuse statute, 720 ILCS 5/12-16(b), which at the time of his conviction stated: The accused commits aggravated criminal sexual abuse if he or she commits an act of sexual conduct with a victim who was under 18 years of age when the act was committed and the accused was a family member. In 2017, the United States filed a five-count civil complaint seeking to revoke Corral’s citizenship on the grounds that he No. 18-2789 3 obtained his citizenship illegally and by willful misrepresen- tation or concealment of a material fact. See 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). We focus on the first count of the government’s complaint, which alleged that Corral lacked good moral character be- cause he committed a crime involving moral turpitude within the statutory period. See 8 U.S.C. § 1427(a)(3); 8 C.F.R. § 316.10(a)(1). In other words, the government sought to re- voke Corral’s citizenship based on his failure to comply with a statutory prerequisite for naturalization, namely, having good moral character during the five years preceding his ap- plication for citizenship until the time he took the oath of al- legiance to the United States. See Fedorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490, 506 (1981) (“Failure ...
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