The right to vote is a foundational promise of citizenship.
Over 800,000 people become naturalized U.S. citizens every year, taking the final step in an arduous process that includes continuous paperwork, background checks and oath of allegiance. Gaining the right to vote in U.S. elections is not only a core incentive, but a civic duty historically instilled into the naturalization process.
That right is now being tragically eroded.
In 2025, the Trump administration and GOP officials in key states have viciously targeted the voting rights of naturalized citizens with new access barriers, selective surveillance and intimidatory rhetoric — signaling that the full promises of citizenship, for many, remain unattainable.
The GOP’s hostility toward naturalized citizens and their newfound political power is not subtle.
Senior officials in the Trump White House, state legislators and right-wing operatives have spent years framing new Americans as an electoral threat — voters whose very participation would supposedly “change” or “replace” the country.
Vice President JD Vance once accused Democrats of encouraging an “invasion” of immigrants to “bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters we already have.” And White House border czar Tom Homan similarly claimed the Biden administration supported immigration because it would create “future Democratic voters,” assuming immigrants will eventually vote Democratic post-citizenship.
Most troubling are comments from officials inside the federal agencies responsible for naturalization, which have echoed and amplified the same narrative that immigrants pose a demographic danger once they become voters and insinuating that the political power of naturalized citizens is inherently illegitimate.
In an interview with the far-right outlet Breitbart earlier this year, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Joseph Edlow stoked conspiracy theories about demographic change, alleging that the prior administration sought to bring nonwhite immigrants to the United States to “make them all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere in the country.”
Coming from the nation’s top naturalization official, the remark frames the process as one that supposedly manufactures the “wrong” kind of voters.
Studies show naturalized citizens are indeed more likely to vote Democratic and are the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S.
Naturalized citizens also often vote at higher rates than native-born citizens — especially among Asian American and Latino communities.
Department of Homeland (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem deployed a similar narrative, saying that the previous administration “has an invasion happening on purpose and it is to remake the foundation of this country.” A federal judge concluded that in her comments, Noem was perpetuating “the discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population” resulting in her aggressive push to end decades-long protections for immigrants.
Meanwhile, a Republican member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Christy McCormick, claimed last month that Democrats want “open borders” because they “need illegal citizens to increase their votes.” Her nonsensical phrase “illegal citizens” intentionally collapses distinctions between different immigrant groups, essentially depicting immigrant citizens as suspect voters whose participation naturally threatens the political order.
Together, these statements reveal an unmistakable through line between top Trump officials tasked with securing the rights of U.S. citizens — new or otherwise — openly arguing that immigrants threaten the nation because they may exercise their legal right to vote.
Within that framework, restricting naturalized citizens’ right to vote becomes not simply permissible but necessary to protect the “homeland” from foreign influence.
The USCIS Voter Registration Ban
The Trump administration’s clearest display of contempt for naturalized citizens came this summer, when USCIS abruptly banned all nongovernmental organizations from providing voter registration assistance at naturalization ceremonies — the very moment new Americans first gain the right to vote.
For decades, civic organizations worked alongside federal officials to help hundreds of thousands of new citizens complete their forms before leaving the building. In 2024 alone, the League of Women Voters registered more than 122,000 new voters at naturalization ceremonies.
That partnership ended overnight. USCIS issued a nationwide directive barring organizations from providing assistance, leaving only state and local election officials authorized to do so — officials who, in most jurisdictions, have never regularly attended these ceremonies and lack the capacity to replace nonpartisan organizations.
Two federal lawsuits — one filed by the League and another by the National Council of Jewish Women of Greater New Orleans (NCJW)* — now challenge the ban as a direct assault on the civil rights of naturalized citizens. The suits argue that the agency is not only stripping citizens of meaningful access to voter registration but doing so with clear discriminatory intent.
“With restrictions on assistance, new citizens leave these ceremonies to the rush of their complicated lives. Affirmatively seeking to register to vote without encountering some other voter registration drive in their community would require them to search out the form, complete it without available translation and determine where and how it can be submitted,” Sylvia Finger, NCJW Greater New Orleans co-chair, told Democracy Docket. “These seemingly minor obstacles create a series of burdens that would certainly decrease the likelihood that many of these individuals follow through with the process.”
The USCIS directive also contained a revealing slip, referring to newly naturalized citizens as “aliens.”
The slippage was small but telling — the nation’s naturalization agency unethically describing new citizens using a largely outdated term exclusively reserved for noncitizens. In a policy about voter registration, the “mislabeling” underscores the administration’s underlying premise that some citizens remain suspect, even after their naturalization is formalized.
The consequences are immediate and severe.
“The pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric and misinformation campaigns increase fear among immigrant communities, regardless of their citizenship status. This hostile environment can lead to self-disenfranchisement,” Joy Willig, NCJW co-chair, added in the interview with Democracy Docket. “New citizens may have family members who have not yet become citizens and thus, either being in public places or providing the government with additional information, puts those family members in danger.”
Seen in context, the USCIS directive is an extension of the Trump administration’s ideological campaign that treats immigrants as politically dangerous and seeks to limit their democratic participation — a policy that strips away a primary avenue for new voters to register, while labeling them “aliens” in the same breath.
The Expansion of SAVE and Denaturalization Threat
If restricting how naturalized citizens register is one half of the Trump administration’s strategy, then removing from the rolls those who already managed to register is the other.
In October, DHS quietly rewrote the rules governing the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a system originally created to help agencies verify the immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits.
Under the new policy, SAVE is now explicitly authorized to serve voter roll “verification” purposes. State election officials can upload entire voter files into the database, allowing DHS to run mass checks for supposed noncitizens on the rolls.
The system has long been criticized for inaccuracies and maintains a fatal flaw for naturalized citizens.
It does not reliably update when someone becomes a U.S. citizen. Naturalized citizens can remain flagged as noncitizens for months or even years.
Yet states like Texas and Tennessee have already dumped their entire voter rolls into SAVE, prompting thousands of false “noncitizen” flags. In one major Texas county, around a quarter of voters flagged as noncitizens by SAVE were actually naturalized citizens — a preview of what nationwide purges could soon look like as more states adopt SAVE for their voter roll maintenance.
The SAVE system has also been heavily censured for violating longstanding norms of privacy.
The panic fueling this system is almost entirely manufactured.
Noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare — so rare that the Heritage Foundation’s own “election fraud” database still relies on a handful of cases, from nearly half a century ago, to push for anti-voting policies.
Nonetheless, the myth of widespread noncitizen voting has become a national GOP talking point, a justification to enact new “proof-of-citizenship” barriers, supercharge surveillance and promote mass voter purges.
The Trump administration has weaponized that myth further by elevating denaturalization — the historically rare process of stripping a naturalized American of their citizenship — as a core enforcement tool.
In June, the Department of Justice instructed its Civil Division to “prioritize and maximally pursue” denaturalization cases against broad categories of people, effectively giving officials the discretion to target individuals based on vague allegations of “fraud.”
In response to a recent shooting of two National Guardsmen in D.C. — involving a single, individual suspect — President Donald Trump reaffirmed his commitment to “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” asserting that citizenship can be revoked if the administration deems someone insufficiently loyal or “not a net asset.” By tying denaturalization to political behavior, not criminal wrongdoing, the administration is redefining a once-extraordinary procedure into a discretionary weapon of conformity.
Trump’s same post also folded naturalized citizens into what he described as a foreign population of “53 million people, most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons.” In portraying naturalized U.S. citizens as an undifferentiated mass of outsiders — “migrants,” “foreign nationals,” and threats who can be removed if “not compatible with Western Civilization” — Trump recasts naturalized citizens as probationary Americans whose citizenship is contingent on political utility or perceived loyalty.
For the 25 million naturalized citizens Trump lumped into his foreign population figure, the threat of a data mismatch, a decades-old paperwork issue or even voting in a way deemed disloyal can trigger severe scrutiny and make them unwilling to exercise their right to vote.
In summary, the SAVE expansion and the denaturalization push create a chilling infrastructure. They create a federal machinery built around the suspicion of naturalized voters, encouraging states to purge eligible voters using flawed data and heighten the fear that interacting with the electoral process may put voters or their families at risk.
State-Level Attacks and Structural Discrimination
Inspired, and sometimes compelled, by the Trump administration to further restrict voting access, Republican lawmakers have enacted sweeping policies this year designed to keep naturalized citizens from the rolls or purge them once they’re in.
Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana and Ohio have all initiated voter roll “citizenship checks” using notoriously outdated DMV records that routinely mislabel naturalized citizens as noncitizens.
States like Arizona and Wisconsin have pursued similar policies, while litigation in Virginia and Georgia has exposed large-scale purges that disproportionately swept up recently naturalized Americans.
But perhaps nowhere is the impact more targeted than in Indiana, where recent laws like HB 1264 and HB 1680 force anyone flagged by outdated Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) data to produce citizenship papers within 30 days or lose their registration.
The laws rely on the state’s “temporary credential” flag — a designation applied to anyone who ever held a noncitizen form of ID, even if they became citizens years ago. The result is a system built to misidentify naturalized Americans while exempting native born voters from the same scrutiny.
“The false narrative about non-citizens voting — even the Heritage Foundation has found no evidence to support it — has provided reason for making registration and voting more difficult, both in Indiana and nationally, ” Linda Hanson, president of the League of Women Voters of Indiana, told Democracy Docket. “If a new citizen takes proof of citizenship to the BMV before their license renews, and pays the $9 fee — essentially a poll tax — to update their record, the citizenship will still not show until renewal. Gathering the documentation will disproportionately impact naturalized citizens if BMV records are not up to date as Indiana’s are likely not to be.”
Once flagged, naturalized citizens enter a bureaucratic gauntlet.
County officials must demand proof-of-citizenship within 48 hours and cancel a voter’s registration if they fail to respond within 30 days — even if the notice is delayed, never received or arrives during an election window. There is no requirement for counties to verify the date a voter received the notice, and no deadline for hearing appeals.
Moreover, replacing a naturalization certificate can be prohibitively expensive and passport processing times can be unforgiving to the 30-day deadline.
Hanson warned that the effects extend beyond paperwork, however.
She noted a broader pattern in which restrictive ID and proof-of-citizenship laws intersect with racialized enforcement and that current trends “requiring ever-more specific IDs to vote, eliminating some that had been accepted, — as student IDs in Indiana — requiring proof-of-citizenship from ever-broader groups of people and intimidation by ICE actions in communities of color” create an atmosphere in which immigrant voters, especially voters of color, are disproportionately pressured to avoid government contact altogether — turning the fear of immigration enforcement into yet another barrier to voting.
Indiana’s crusade against naturalized voters has been driven largely by Secretary of State Diego Morales (R) — a naturalized citizen himself.
Often invoking his own immigrant story as evidence of his commitment to “legal” citizenship, Morales has become one of the most forceful champions of policies and myths that disproportionately harm people who follow the same path he once did.
Morales publicly attacked Democracy Docket and other outlets for reporting on lawsuits challenging Indiana’s voting laws, denouncing headlines about the targeting of “naturalized citizens” as “misleading.” He further dismissed real obstacles naturalized citizens face, ridiculing concerns as “absurd” and presenting them as evidence of personal failings rather than systemic burdens.
*The Elias Law Group (ELG) is representing the plaintiffs in the case. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.