The Trump administration has slowed the path to U.S. citizenship to a crawl — right before an election.
From April through June, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved about 55,000 applications for citizenship, according to Stateline's reading of the agency's own quarterly numbers. In the same three months a year earlier, it approved more than 230,000.
Stateline added it up: if USCIS had kept approving people at the old pace, almost 380,000 more immigrants would have become citizens over the past year. Since only adults go through this process, nearly all of them would have been able to vote on November 3.
How they did it
USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler told Stateline that approvals started dropping late last year when the agency rolled out a new, longer process. It includes:
- screening applicants' social media for "anti-American activities"
- a tougher civics test and stricter English requirements
- making sure applicants show "good moral character and attachment to the Constitution"
"Naturalization is a privilege, not a right," Kahler wrote. "USCIS will not take shortcuts in the naturalization process."
The numbers tell you what "no shortcuts" means in practice. About 871,000 people became citizens between mid-2024 and mid-2025. In the following year, about 481,000 did.
"An apparent effort to deny … voting rights"
The National Partnership for New Americans, an immigrant advocacy group, says the slowdown isn't just in the paperwork. In October, it said the administration is deliberately stretching out wait times across the naturalization process, "including significant delays between interview approval and the Oath of Allegiance."
In other words, some people have already passed their citizenship interview and are just waiting to take the oath. Until they do, they can't vote.
"We see a very clear attempt to curb legal pathways, including who gets to the finish line on naturalization," the group's executive director, Nicole Melaku, told Stateline.
Part of a bigger push
The slowdown didn't happen alone. Stateline notes it comes as administration officials try to block some ballots from being counted and threaten election officials with prosecution. This week, a coalition of civil rights groups accused the Department of Homeland Security of targeting naturalized citizens in voter investigations, warning that legitimate voters might be disenfranchised.
We've covered how that department sent agents door to door asking people whether they'd voted — a practice a judge said likely broke the Voting Rights Act. And Republicans in Congress have gone further still: Andrew Clyde has called for stripping Americans of their citizenship for being Muslim.
Why it's a lot of voters
About 25 million eligible voters — roughly 1 in 10 — are naturalized citizens, according to a Pew Research Center report released this week. In some states the share is much bigger: 22% in California, 20% in New Jersey, 19% in New York and 17% in Florida.
How those 380,000 people would have voted is hard to say. An earlier Pew analysis found naturalized citizens voted Democratic by a wide margin in 2020, but almost half voted for Trump in 2024. But Stateline reports that recent elections in immigrant areas of Florida and New Jersey have swung back toward Democrats as anger grows over mass arrests and deportations.
What the numbers show
The Trump administration's citizenship agency approved about 55,000 applications this spring, down from more than 230,000 a year earlier, after adding social-media screening and other new hurdles. Stateline calculates that about 380,000 immigrants who would have become citizens at the old pace did not — nearly all adults who could have voted on November 3. The agency's own spokesperson defended it by saying naturalization "is a privilege, not a right."
Source
Trump administration has slow-walked 380K potential immigrant voters, Tim Henderson, Stateline, October 29, 2026 (republished by the Pennsylvania Capital-Star).
