The Trump Administration’s Stealthiest Voter Suppression Scheme

In addition to the usual difficulties in executing something as complex as an election, local and state officials in the run-up to this week’s midterms—in which Democrats are increasingly expected to win big, in part due to the public’s deep discontent with the Trump administration—are having to deal with the administration’s multitiered efforts to suppress the vote, from trying to centralize election control in the White House to having federal agents “investigate” spurious claims of voter fraud.There is, however, one disenfranchisement method that’s largely played out in the background, out of public view, partly as a result of its being targeted at would-be voters who are not yet technically able to vote—preventing people who should by all rights be citizens from naturalizing in time to cast their ballots.MAGA-world has been obsessed with the unsupported notion that there are masses of noncitizens voting around the country, not just now but historically; they still blame this, among other things, for Trump’s and other MAGA luminaries’ vote losses, including in the 2020 election. Years of concerted efforts to discover such fraud have turned up almost nothing, which is why the political movement has seized so fervently on isolated anomalies like New Jersey’s accidental registration of some 6,000 noncitizens, of whom a negligible number appear to have actually voted in state elections.Whether people like Trump or Stephen Miller actually believe that there is widespread incidence of noncitizen voting in elections nationwide, or merely see this as the most convenient path toward instituting formal and informal restrictions on voting, is beside the point. The upshot is that this phantasmal problem is nevertheless animating both political discourse and concrete actions designed to actually keep people from the polls—that is to say, it is providing fuel to manipulate elections under the banner of guarding against electoral manipulation.At the same time, the government has been engaged in a much less noticed flip side of the coin, preventing people from becoming citizens as the election approaches. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, data analyzed by Bloomberg and other outlets shows that decisions on pending naturalization applications are down about 75 percent this year as compared to last, and denials on those decisions are up disproportionally—with about 18 percent of applications denied in the third quarter of 2026, compared to 9 percent in the same quarter last year. Wait times have more than doubled to over a year on average, all translating to around 50,000 fewer naturalizations per month this year than in the last two years, playing out in states across the country.The Trump administration seems to have taken it upon itself to hollow USCIS out, as with many federal agencies, but there’s the additional dimension here that opposition to immigration has been a lodestar of the MAGA movement. Accordingly, the White House has worked to shape USCIS from an impartial(ish) adjudicator to an extension of its enforcement apparatus, arming it with additional powers to deny applications. Informally, there is rumored to be a naturalizations cap imposed by the White House, with USCIS responsible for slow-walking or denying applications such that approvals do not go above a certain level. (USCIS has never publicly acknowledged such a directive.)The upshot is that hundreds of thousands of people who should in theory have been naturalized between last year and the midterm elections are left waiting for a decision or appealing potentially frivolous denials. We don’t tend to think of this as disenfranchisement, in the sense that these folks did not have an existing right to vote that was taken away or limited, but historically we have understood obstacles to eligibility for people who should by rights be eligible to vote to fall under the umbrella of voter disenfranchisement and suppression.“As naturalization delays grow, so do concerns that eligible immigrants are being prevented from becoming citizens in time to vote in the midterms,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the nonpartisan national enfranchisement organization League of Women Voters, or LWV, in a statement to The New Republic. LWV had recently successfully sued to block a USCIS policy that had prevented the organization from continuing a longtime practice of offering voter registration services at naturalization ceremonies. Unfortunately, for there to be such ceremonies, there must be people who are being naturalized. “While the administration continues to focus on baseless claims about noncitizens voting, its actions risk creating barriers for eligible future citizens seeking to exercise their fundamental rights,” added Stewart.While there are generally at least some concrete remedies for citizens disenfranchised by the administration and its state-level lackeys’ voter suppression efforts—there is litigation over attempts to use a flawed database to flag supposedly unqualified voters, for example, and voters turned away at the polls can generally at least submit affidavit ballots—there is little that citizens-to-be can do but watch as another election proceeds without their vote. USCIS’s administrative decisions are not generally reviewable by federal courts, and noncitizens have no ability to demand a right that is theoretical until a decision is made; even if they are granted an approval or defeat a denial, elections will have come and gone in the interim.These are not paltry numbers. If naturalizations have fallen by 50,000 or so a month over the last year, that’s well over half a million would-be citizens around the country left waiting, including in crucial states and districts with razor-thin margins that will cumulatively determine control of the House and Senate. USCIS data shows, for example, that between the start of April and of June this year, the three field offices in Ohio—Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus—cumulatively approved 990 naturalizations, denied 267, and had nearly 9,000 cases pending. During the same period last year, the three offices approved 2,921 cases, denied 263, and had fewer cases pending. The state is the site of multiple House races that are neck and neck and a tight Senate race between incumbent John Husted and former Senator Sherrod Brown.Whether or not these would-be citizens could or would influence these close races matters, but it’s no less disenfranchisement in noncompetitive seats. A core pillar of the whole edifice of our constitutional democracy is the oft-repeated maxim, “No taxation without representation.” The judicial demolishing of the Civil Rights Act, gerrymandering, the contemporary status of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and much more, have already hammered some sizable holes in that structure, and now Trump’s naturalization stall-out is eating away at the foundation.