Lawful permanent residents are seeing their naturalization ceremonies abruptly canceled this month as the Trump administration puts an indefinite “hold” on immigration applications from certain countries.
The holds apply to green card and U.S. citizenship requests by people from 19 countries deemed “high risk” by the Trump administration. The list includes Cuba, Iran, Haiti and Somalia, among others.
Lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, are already among the most thoroughly vetted individuals in the nation’s immigration system. When they decide to naturalize, they undergo an even more comprehensive government review that includes background checks, interviews with immigration officers and a citizenship test.
The citizenship ceremony is the last step in a long process that starts with having a green card for several years, submitting the application, paying hundreds of dollars in fees, completing an interview with an immigration officer, passing a background check as well as an English and civics test, all before finally taking the oath.
“If you’re scheduled for an oath ceremony, you have gone through all of the checks that are required,” said Deborah Chen, supervising attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group’s immigrant protection unit.
The Trump administration’s new policy placing a hold on naturalization ceremonies for immigrants from the 19 countries is the latest among several other changes implemented this year that could make it more difficult for many lawful permanent residents to become U.S. citizens.
In addition to the holds on immigration applications, the administration is cutting grants to groups that help prepare people to become citizens, implementing stricter social media vetting for those seeking citizenship, conducting neighborhood investigations into applicants’ “moral character,” and giving a more difficult civics test required for citizenship.
Ready to become citizens — now ‘re-scrutinized’
In Florida, Anyi Cabrales, who is Cuban, went to the salon on the morning of Dec. 1 to get her hair done ahead of her citizenship ceremony, she shared on social media. Cabrales told Noticias Telemundo she had been looking forward to the special occasion for the past eight months, but a few hours before being sworn in as a U.S. citizen she received a phone call from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official notifying her about the cancelation.
In Massachusetts, a Haitian immigrant who has lived in the state for more than 20 years was pulled out of the line at her citizenship oath ceremony on Dec. 4, Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, the legal services organization helping the woman, told NBC Boston.
“It’s just because of this policy memo, all of a sudden, everyone from these 19 countries are going to be re-scrutinized,” NYLAG’s Chen said.
Throughout the year, USCIS has been cutting back on naturalization ceremonies in smaller localities across the nation, many of them held in public or donated venues such as public libraries and historical sites and buildings like Oakland’s Paramount Theatre in California and the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.
Last month, USCIS canceled naturalization ceremonies held in local courthouses across seven counties in upstate New York. Those ceremonies were quickly reinstated two days later following public outcry. This week, three of those counties had their ceremonies canceled again.
In Ulster County, one of the counties affected, the cancelations are causing not just “emotional damage” to those ready to take their citizenship oath, said Victor Cueva, a naturalized citizen born in Peru who serves as the executive director of the Ulster Immigrant Defense Network. “There’s also legal damage.” Canceling these ceremonies, and in many cases not rescheduling them, Cueva said, “is a harm done to people that have gone through 99% of the naturalization process.”
USCIS has said it wants to do away with judicial oath ceremonies, which take place at courthouses, and allow only administrative ceremonies that are held in USCIS field offices or other federal buildings. For some, the cancelations would mean that people would have to wait longer and travel farther outside their county to take their citizenship oath.
USCIS did not respond to a request for comment. The agency previously told NBC News it had concerns about the efficient use of USCIS grants following the funding freeze in February. In a policy email made public by the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, USCIS said it stopped coordinating naturalization ceremonies in public venues, preferring to continue conducting them at USCIS field offices.
President Donald Trump laid the foundation for a more strict naturalization process in his Jan. 20 executive order seeking to enhance vetting and screening efforts for migrants coming to the United States as well as those already in the country.
About a month later, the Trump administration stopped disbursing USCIS grants to organizations providing English classes and civics instruction to lawful permanent residents getting ready for their citizenship interviews and tests.
In Rhode Island, Channavy Chhay began noticing the ripple effects of these cutbacks. As the executive director of the Center for Southeast Asians, she works with many families who’ve come from Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.
In a state that is home to one of the nation’s largest Southeast Asian refugee populations per capita, there are essentially no citizenship classes, Chhay said. The discontinuation of the USCIS grants jeopardized the support of four federally funded citizenship and immigration services programs in Rhode Island that helped lawful permanent residents go through the naturalization process.
In June, following the travel ban on 19 “high risk“ countries including Laos and Myanmar, decisions on immigration applications from many in these communities stalled, Chhay said. After all immigration requests from people in these countries were indefinitely halted this month, it “just went dark.”
“We haven’t seen anyone get sworn in or get the chance to even file to become U.S. citizens. We haven’t seen that at all for a long time,” said Chhay.
Aside from USCIS’ use of criminal history checks by the FBI and biometric screening, between August and September the Trump administration reintroduced neighborhood investigations into prospective citizens’ “moral character” as well as stricter social media vetting of applicants. The agency has said the changes are part of a “multi-step overhaul” to restore “robust vetting for all aliens and stricter reviews.” In neighborhood investigations, immigration officers visit an applicant’s home to assess good “moral character” and interview neighbors, landlords, co-workers and other community members about the applicant.
Some clients of the New York Legal Assistance Group who had pending naturalization applications when the new policies went into effect were denied because they owed taxes, even though they were on a payment plan, according to NYLAG’s Chen.
“It used to be that if you didn’t have any arrests, that was good enough,” Chen said, adding “that’s not good enough” anymore. To prove “good moral character,” applicants must also show “positive attributes,” such as family caregiving, educational attainment, stable employment and community involvement.
With the growing scrutiny, compounded by immigration officers’ wider discretion to determine if someone has “good moral character,” the organization began advising more clients to renew their green cards instead of going through the naturalization process, Chen said, to avoid any potential issues that could jeopardize a person’s legal immigration status.
USCIS plans to soon open a vetting center in Atlanta that will use “powerful screening resources” and “state-of-the-art technologies” including artificial intelligence to review immigration applications, especially from “presidentially designated countries of concern,” according to a news release.
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