Opinion: Washington Is Making Citizenship Harder to Get and Easier to Lose

Becoming an American citizen has always been a bureaucratic ordeal — years of waiting, a stack of forms, a civics quiz, an oath. What has changed over the past 18 months is something more fundamental: the government has made the process markedly harder to complete, more expensive to attempt, and, for a fast-growing number of people who already finished it, no longer final. Taken individually, each policy has a defensible rationale. Taken together, they amount to the most significant tightening of what U.S. citizenship means since the loyalty purges of the McCarthy era, and they deserve more scrutiny than they have gotten.

The Test Got Harder, on Purpose

Start with the exam itself. Acting on a January 2025 executive order directing agencies to re-evaluate immigrant assimilation standards, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services revived and expanded the civics test, formalized in a Federal Register notice implementing the 2025 test. As of applications filed on or after October 20, 2025, the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test draws from a pool of 128 questions rather than 100, quizzes applicants on 20 of them instead of 10, and requires 12 correct answers to pass instead of six. USCIS officers can now cut an interview short the moment an applicant locks in a pass or a fail — efficient, perhaps, but also a sharper cliff edge for the nervous, the elderly, or the imperfectly fluent.

Reasonable people can debate whether a tougher civics bar is a good idea. What's harder to defend is doing it alongside two other changes that have nothing to do with civic knowledge at all.

A Fee Increase That Prices Out the People It's Supposed to Naturalize

The Department of Homeland Security has proposed raising the fee for Form N-400, the naturalization application, from $760 to $1,330 for paper filings and from $710 to $1,280 online — a roughly 75 to 80 percent jump, according to the proposed rule published in the Federal Register in June. The same rule would eliminate the existing reduced fee for lower-income applicants and end fee-waiver eligibility altogether, except for active-duty service members and veterans. The public comment period closed August 24; DHS has not yet said when, or whether, it will finalize the increase.

A fee is not, on its own, a civil-rights violation. But a naturalization application is already a multi-year investment of time, legal help, and paperwork for people who are, by definition, not yet in a position to vote their way out of the decision. Stripping the low-income waiver at the same moment the price roughly doubles will not stop wealthy applicants; it will stop the immigrant who has been here for a decade, worked, paid taxes, and simply doesn't have an extra $600 lying around.

Citizenship With an Asterisk

The more consequential shift is what has happened to citizenship after it's granted. In June 2025, the Justice Department's Civil Division instructed its attorneys to "prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law." The results are stark. Nonpartisan court-record trackers at Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that the federal government historically filed fewer than one civil denaturalization lawsuit a month; in 2025 that rose to eight for the entire year, and by May and June of 2026 alone, prosecutors had filed 33 more. The Justice Department's own numbers, announced in an August news release, put the total at 123 civil denaturalization complaints since January 20, 2025 — the most in the government's recorded history, and, according to internal planning reported by CNN, still building toward a target of roughly 250 cases by this fall.

"Today's filings represent the largest coordinated denaturalization effort in Department history, but they are only the beginning."

That line comes from the acting attorney general's own statement announcing 25 new cases in a single push. The people named in these complaints — the department's releases cite convicted rapists, child sex offenders and fraudsters — are not sympathetic, and few would argue that someone who lied about a violent felony on a naturalization form should get to keep the citizenship that lie secured. Civil denaturalization for provable fraud is not new; it has existed since the Immigration and Nationality Act was written. What's new is the scale, the speed, and the fact that civil denaturalization proceedings carry none of the protections of a criminal trial — no appointed counsel, no jury, and a lower burden of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt." TRAC's researchers have specifically flagged that the surge has come with less public disclosure of the evidentiary basis for each case, not more, making it hard for outside observers to know how many of the 123 rest on the kind of clear-cut fraud DOJ highlights in its press releases, versus thinner, more contestable claims.

The Courts Have Already Pushed Back Once

The clearest evidence that these efforts have outrun the law came earlier this year, when a federal judge intervened in a related piece of the same agenda. Starting in late 2025, USCIS placed an indefinite "adjudicative hold" on green card, work-permit and naturalization applications from nationals of 39 countries it deemed high-risk, and instructed officers to treat an applicant's nationality itself as a negative factor in discretionary decisions. In Doe v. Trump, U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick found that framework likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and by early May had extended relief to more than 260 plaintiffs before the policy was vacated outright, according to legal analysis from the American Immigration Council. The human cost of the hold while it lasted was documented by NBC News, which reported on a Cuban applicant whose oath ceremony was canceled hours before she was to be sworn in, and a Haitian immigrant in Massachusetts pulled from the ceremony line after two decades of lawful residence, both for no reason beyond their country of birth.

A court has already ruled that one strand of this agenda went further than the law allows. That should be a warning sign for the rest of it, not a one-off correction. When adjudicative holds are found unlawful, when a fee increase strips waivers from the working poor at the same time it prices out the middle class, and when denaturalization filings jump fifteen-fold in eighteen months with less transparency rather than more, the pattern is not incidental. It is a deliberate effort to shrink, at every stage, the number of people who can become citizens and to loosen the finality of citizenship for those who already are.

What Should Happen Now

None of this requires abandoning enforcement against genuine naturalization fraud, and Congress and DHS are entitled to update a civics test that hadn't changed in years. But due process is not optional because the underlying goal is popular. DHS should finalize its fee rule only with the low-income waiver restored — Congress created the waiver for a reason, and an agency cannot legislate it away through rulemaking. The Justice Department should publish, case by case, the evidentiary basis for each denaturalization filing, exactly as TRAC has requested, so that "record numbers" can be checked against reality rather than taken on faith from a press release. And Congress, which has oversight authority over both USCIS and the Civil Division, should hold hearings on the denaturalization surge before the caseload reaches the administration's stated goal of 250, not after. Citizenship is supposed to be the one immigration status in American law that, once granted lawfully, cannot be casually withdrawn. That guarantee is being tested in real time, and so far, no one outside a single federal courtroom in Boston has forced Washington to show its work.