By Dana DiFilippo
Reprinted with permission
New Jersey Monitor
Election observers and immigration advocates are alarmed about a new Trump administration push to bar nonprofits from registering voters at federal naturalization ceremonies, saying the policy shift represents an effort to suppress voters.
The change, made by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, upends a decades-long tradition by nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters, whose members estimate they have registered hundreds of thousands of new citizens at such ceremonies.
Melissa Marks, who works with the league’s New Jersey chapter, called the new policy “a blatant attempt to keep new citizens from accessing and exercising their full rights.”
“By shutting us out and other civic partners as well, this policy change makes it harder for new citizens to register to vote, and it’s yet another intimidation tactic and an attack on our immigrant community,” Marks said.
Spokespeople with Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to answer questions, referring the New Jersey Monitor to an alert the agency issued on Aug. 29.
That alert says the change was necessary to eliminate “the administrative burden on USCIS to ensure that those nongovernmental organizations who provide voter registration services are nonpartisan” and cited “USCIS interests in judiciously deploying limited agency resources.”
The alert noted that new citizens can register to vote online, reducing the need for nonprofits to help them do it at naturalization ceremonies.
“This change in no way impacts new citizens’ access to information and applications to register to vote, as this information will continue to be provided by state or local election officials, or USCIS staff at the end of naturalization ceremonies,” the alert says.
Zhang Mazi, 33, of Jersey City, said he saw no state or local officials on hand Monday to register voters when he became a U.S. citizen at a naturalization ceremony at the Peter W. Rodino Federal Office Building in Newark. A federal official who spoke to the new citizens told them they should vote in elections but offered no guidance on how to do so, Zhang added.
“Most of the speech was focused on how to get a passport. There was no, like, outside support coming to tell people how they can register to vote. So people just kind of went home,” Zhang said. “I really think that’s a huge missed opportunity.”
He did get a take-home handout that contained a paragraph informing new citizens they can register to vote in person, by mail, at public assistance offices, or when renewing driver’s licenses — without details on how. The handout directed readers to vote.gov.
Nuzhat Chowdhury, director of the democracy and justice program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, noted that the policy change comes amid an uptick nationally in voter ID laws that groups like the League of Women Voters say promote voter suppression, especially in marginalized communities, as well as President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud by undocumented immigrants. Researchers have examined Trump’s claim and say they have found very few instances of noncitizens voting.
“This new policy pretends to fix a problem that doesn’t actually exist, and it also makes people doubt the integrity of our voting process, which is the sort of fear-mongering about voting rights and democracy that we’ve seen the current administration proliferate again and again,” Chowdhury said.
Amy Torres is executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, which does voter registration work, including at naturalization ceremonies.
Many immigrants have language barriers and a distrust of the government, and without the assistance of trusted volunteers to help them register, the number of new citizens who become voters could fall, Torres said. Some believe citizenship automatically grants them voting rights and don’t understand they must register to be able to vote, she added.
Preventing nonprofits from registering voters at naturalization ceremonies likely will have an outsized impact in New Jersey, a state that has the highest proportion (along with New York) of foreign-born eligible voters of any state besides California, Torres said.
Nineteen percent of eligible voters in both New Jersey and New York are naturalized citizens, with that figure at 21% in California, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center report. More than 45,500 people became citizens in naturalization ceremonies at Citizenship and Immigration Services offices in Newark, Cranbury, and Mount Laurel in the 2024 fiscal year, with another 47,224 so far in the current fiscal year, according to federal data.
“This is really a move that is designed to disenfranchise voters and take their political power away,” Torres said.
She pushed back on immigration officials’ complaints that vetting nonprofits had become a burden or a problem of limited resources.
“There’s a huge naturalization backlog, so I don’t think it’s voter registration that’s causing burdens to the system,” Torres said. “It’s pouring money into enforcement and away from the part of the system that helps people towards pathways to reprieve or pathways to citizenship.”
Marks, of the League of Women Voters, echoed that pushback.
“It’s a burden to ask the USCIS staff to do another job on top of the job they already have. We’re here to help lift that burden. We’re well-respected, well-known for our deep history in being a nonpartisan organization. So we’re not sure what the concern is here,” Marks said.
Spokespeople from the New Jersey Department of State did not respond to a request for comment about whether state election officials would fill nonprofits’ absence at naturalization ceremonies. Chowdhury isn’t betting on them.
“If state and local election offices are the only ones who can now register folks at the naturalization ceremonies, it really depends on their capacity, and we see that they already are stretched thin,” Chowdhury said. “So less folks are going to get registered to vote. Eventually, that does result in voter suppression.”
Marks noted that nonprofits have not been blocked from naturalization ceremonies in federal courts, and the League of Women Voters will continue its voter registration efforts there, while also strategizing how to register new citizens to vote elsewhere.
“We’re not giving up,” Marks said. “We’re still 100% committed to reaching this community.”
