Trump Administration Has Slow-Walked 380K Potential Immigrant Voters

The Trump administration cut naturalization sharply over the past year, leading to accusations that it’s holding back hundreds of thousands of people who might have voted in the midterms.

It’s hard to say how those people might have voted had they become U.S. citizens. Naturalized citizens voted Democratic for president by a wide margin in 2020, but in a shift, almost half voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, according to a Pew Research Center analysis last year. {snip}

The most recent quarterly report from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services shows the agency approved about 55,000 requests for citizenship between April and June, compared with more than 230,000 for the same period last year.

Naturalizations began dropping late last year as USCIS started a new, longer process for applicants, including screening social media accounts for “anti-American activities,” and requirements for more English language and civics knowledge, USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler told Stateline in a statement.

The potential impact: Almost 380,000 immigrants might have become citizens — and therefore voters — over the past year had the approval rate stayed the same. Almost all would have been potential midterm voters since only adults can complete the naturalization process recorded in statistics — children can get naturalized citizenship in other ways based on their parents’ status.

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The potential difference of 380,000 voters is calculated by the lag between about 871,000 new citizens approved between mid-2024 and mid-2025 — including during parts of the Biden and second Trump administrations — and the latest year, with about 481,000 approvals.

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“Naturalization is a privilege, not a right,” Kahler wrote in the statement to Stateline. {snip}

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About 10% of eligible voters, 25 million, are naturalized immigrants as of 2024, according to an Oct. 27 Pew Research Center report, up steadily since 2000, when it was 6.2%.

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