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Johanan Rivera considered becoming a U.S. citizen for years, but it was never a priority. Rivera, an immigrant who still has family in Mexico, worried that naturalization would make him feel like he was losing his "Mexicanness," and he was content to live in the United States as a permanent resident.
But in February 2025, after 15 years in the United States, Rivera finally applied to naturalize. He became a U.S. citizen about a year later.
"The second Trump administration came into office, and [my partner and I] wanted more certainty about being able to live in the same country," he told NPR in an interview on the day of his March naturalization ceremony at the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. "It's been the result of political change that pushed forward the process."
Newly released data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes citizenship applications, shows that 2025 was marked by fluctuations in applications for naturalization and a drop in people being approved to become citizens.
Immigration experts said the trends show in real time how President Trump's restrictive immigration policies, ramped-up deportation efforts and increased scrutiny have affected people at the tail end of their legal immigration journey.
While 2025 began with high rates of citizenship applications submitted and decided, by the end of the year fewer immigrants were applying to become citizens — and even fewer were granted access to this final milestone, according to the data. The downward trend in recent months, experts and former officials said, reflects a decline in faith in America's immigration system.
"The fear is pretty pervasive," said Felicia Escobar Carrillo, former USCIS chief of staff under the Biden administration. "I think that people are just going to think twice about whether to apply."
During the first few months of Trump's second term, the administration approved a record-high number of naturalizations. At the peak of 2025, 88,488 applications were approved in one month — the largest number since USCIS began tracking month-by-month naturalization data in 2022.
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But by January of this year, that number had dropped to 32,862, the lowest since USCIS began tracking that data.
The decrease in approvals for citizenship comes amid fluctuations in those applying to naturalize. At the peak of 2025, 169,159 people applied to naturalize in October. The very next month, only 41,478 people applied, the lowest of the year.
"What we see from this administration, just at a very high level, is an effort to define who is an American," said Margy O'Herron, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. "Giving somebody citizenship is granting somebody status as an American. There's an effort to control that."
Nicole Melaku is executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, which campaigns for immigrant inclusion. She said the administration's messaging encourages immigrants to pursue status legally — but the declining number of naturalizations offers a different narrative.
"We are beginning to see the manifestation of data that proves that this administration is slow-walking or even denying the opportunity for these people," she said.
USCIS told NPR that it is pausing making decisions on the applications for immigrants from high-risk countries and implementing more screening and vetting processes.
"This includes reimplementing the 2020 naturalization civics test for 2025, strengthened English language requirements, screening social media for anti-American activities, and restoring neighborhood investigations to ensure applicants demonstrate good moral character and an attachment to the Constitution," USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser said in a statement to NPR.
"USCIS will not take shortcuts in the adjudications process."
The rush to become a citizen in Trump's America
Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration consultant and an immigration fellow at Cornell Law School and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, said political factors could have driven some people to apply to naturalize in early 2025, especially as Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations. From February through April, 270,290 people applied to become U.S. citizens.
"People who want to secure their place and be sure that they are not subject to deportation might have wanted to gain their citizenship," Brown said. "They may have been eligible for quite a while but not thinking that there was any urgency. Suddenly there's something that means, 'Maybe I should go ahead and do this.'"
This was the driving force behind Rivera's decision to naturalize.
"There are so many things happening in the country that I felt like just having residency was not enough," he said. "[U.S. citizenship] gives flexibility and security."
During the same time period, the Trump administration approved record numbers of new citizens. More people were naturalized in each of March, April and May 2025 than in any month of 2024, when Joe Biden was in office.
The second half of 2025, however, was marked by volatility in both naturalization applications and approvals.
In August, USCIS announced it would conduct more stringent evaluations to ensure every new citizen has "good moral character," including a "greater emphasis on positive attributes or contributions" and "greater scrutiny of disqualifying behavior and action."
In September, the agency shared plans for a longer and tougher citizenship test. It also instituted neighborhood checks, a policy largely unused since 1991 in which immigration officers visit the homes and neighborhoods of people hoping to naturalize to evaluate the individuals' contributions to their communities. Immigration experts and former USCIS officials said this level of scrutiny is time-consuming and is likely slowing down approvals.
"USCIS has taken an 'America First' approach, restoring order, security, integrity, and accountability to America's immigration system, ensuring that it serves the nation's interests and protects and prioritizes Americans over foreign nationals," USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a statement touting these and other changes.
Brown, of Cornell Law School, said these announcements could have prompted some otherwise hesitant people to naturalize before these rules went into effect — or in anticipation of further rules. In October, 169,159 people, a four-year record, applied to naturalize.
"So all of those kinds of changes can push people — if they think they have a better chance under current rules — to get in before the rules change," she said.
But October also marked a sharp drop-off in the number of people approved by USCIS: Approvals dropped from more than 70,000 to only 58,692 people. The number of people approved continued to decrease each month through the end of the year.
Overall processing also plummeted: The total number of completions by month (or approvals and denials taken together) went from 78,379 in September 2025 to 37,832 by January 2026.
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The drops can be partly explained by restrictions placed on processing citizenship applications. The administration paused immigration processes, including naturalizations, for people from one of 39 countries, as well as those with travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority, as part of a slew of restrictions.
The halt came after an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., in late November. One of the Guard members died the next day from her injuries. The suspect was later charged with murder.
Opting out of naturalization
By November, the number of people applying to naturalize dropped to 41,478. In December, 42,569 applied; in January, that number ticked up slightly to 46,385 — still almost a 50% drop from the year prior.
USCIS declined to comment on why fewer people were applying to naturalize.
Gianina Horton, a city council member in Aurora, Colo., said that many immigrants in her city eligible for naturalization are choosing not to go through the process now. Trump has painted Aurora as a city "buckled under the weight of migrant occupation" and in need of mass deportations. Horton said in Aurora, this messaging eroded locals' trust in the U.S. immigration system.
"There is an understanding that we're in a political climate where it is unsafe for a lot of immigrants to engage with federal agencies. Whether that is true or perceived, it is still a huge influential factor," Horton said. "Do I really want to put my name on a list where I could be targeted, because it's already on some other list that could potentially be targeted, right? So there is a risk assessment that folks are doing in real time."
The drop in people applying to naturalize is another sign that Trump's immigration crackdown is transforming the U.S. immigration system, including naturalizations, some immigration experts said.
In December and continuing into 2026, some people were shocked to find that they were refused entry to their scheduled citizenship ceremonies: the very last step in the immigration process, where new citizens take their pledge of allegiance to the United States.
"What we see this administration doing is targeting even people who have followed all the rules. The administration is changing the rules on those folks," said O'Herron, of the Brennan Center for Justice. "That unpredictability creates a real sense of fear."
"So putting yourself into the system can create some vulnerability that lying low would not," she added.
Daniel Chigirinsky, originally from Hungary, applied to become a U.S. citizen in the spring of 2025. He became scared reading about the changes to naturalization while he was in the middle of his own citizenship process.
"Showing up for the interview was a terrifying experience," said Chigirinsky, who became a U.S. citizen in March. "And I, for one, know I didn't have anything to worry about."
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