Lawsuit Blasts Trump’s Bid to Keep New Citizens From Registering to Vote

A civil rights organization sued the Trump administration Saturday over a new policy barring nonprofits from helping new U.S. citizens register to vote.

The lawsuit calls the policy part of a “broader effort to ensure that new Americans cannot exert their democratic will on the nation.”

Since 2011, nongovernmental groups (NGOs) have helped many thousands of people register to vote after they swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S. and officially become citizens. In late August, however, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced an abrupt change banning groups from providing voter registration services at naturalization ceremonies. 

“USCIS is clarifying that only state and local election officials will be permitted to offer voter registration services at the end of administrative naturalization ceremonies,” USCIS said, claiming that the purpose of the change was to emphasize “the non-partisan nature of voter registration services offered to new citizens at administrative naturalization ceremonies.”

In its new lawsuit, the National Council of Jewish Women, Greater New Orleans Section, argued that the abrupt change unlawfully discriminates against naturalized citizens in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.

“This policy change surgically targets naturalized citizens and their exercise of the franchise,” the lawsuit reads. “On information and belief, administrative naturalization ceremonies—where, by definition, the people that NGOs assist are new Americans—are the only settings from which NGOs have been categorically barred from helping people register.”

The Council asserted that USCIS’s new policy will leave thousands without a way to register to vote directly after they become citizens, as state and local officials are often unavailable to help new citizens register.

“For the NGOs who focus on registering new voters, the Voter Assistance Ban eliminates the single best—and arguably, the only—option for finding and registering these voters en masse,” the lawsuit reads. “Outside of rare judicial ceremonies, there is no equivalent place where naturalized citizens are likely to gather—and thus, no straightforward way to find new Americans to help them register.”

The Council also argued that USCIS’s change is part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to suppress naturalized citizens’ civic power. It noted that senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance, “cast immigrants as an existential threat to the United States—particularly because they may become voters.”

“Fueled by this hostility to the changing electorate, the ban on voter assistance at naturalization ceremonies is one prong in Defendants’ and other officials’ broader effort to ensure that new Americans cannot exert their democratic will on the nation,” the lawsuit reads. 

In recent years, the political right has been taken in by a rampant conspiracy theory claiming that NGOs and unnamed “political elites” are purposefully increasing the number of minorities in the American electorate to favor the Democratic Party.

The once-fringe racist conspiracy theory has now become mainstream in the Republican Party, with President Donald Trump routinely perpetuating it on social media. 

The Elias Law Group (ELG) is representing the plaintiffs in the case. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.