Citizenship applications rising amid Trump fears
Elizabeth Camacho, a public defender in San Francisco, put off applying for U.S. citizenship for years. But this election year, the task took on new urgency.
In January, as she sat with a group of attorneys at a conference, the talk turned to presidential candidate Donald Trump — and his accusation that Mexico was sending its worst people to the U.S.
Camacho, 30, who came to California from Mexico as a child and was undocumented for years before gaining her green card as a permanent resident, was reminded of school bullies who called her a “wetback” and ridiculed her lan-
guage skills.
As her fellow attorneys discussed why the Latino community wasn't standing up to Trump, she had an epiphany: She would apply for her citizenship and vote against him.
“It was important for me to have a voice for all the people who can’t organize or vote,” said Camacho, who became a citizen in August. “I felt that was my responsibility.”
Camacho was among 718,430 people who applied for citizenship from Oct. 1 to June 30, government records show — a 25 percent increase from the same period a year earlier and the highest number for that time frame in an election year since 1996.
While experts say the rise in applications can’t be directly attributed to Trump, and that larger increases have been seen in non-election years as recent as 2007, immigrant advocates say they’ve seen a wave of people motivated by the GOP candidate.
For many Latino immigrants, voting against Trump is a way to fight back against his rhetoric — he has said many of the “unwanted people” coming from Mexico are criminals and rapists — as well as his proposals to build an “impenetrable” wall on the southern border and deport millions of people who are living in the U.S. without documentation.
Only those who are permanent residents for a few years are eligible to apply for citizenship, and only citizens can vote.
Marissa Montes, co-director of Loyola Law School’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, which holds workshops in Los Angeles to help people apply for citizenship, said she has seen a three- to fourfold increase in attendance this year. It’s a similar story in the Bay Area, where the East Bay branch of Catholic Charities has welcomed nearly double the usual number of attendees at the five naturalization events it has held this year.
Over and over, Montes said, she hears the same two explanations from those who attend: They want to vote against Trump, or they are worried they might face repercussions under a Trump presidency if they have a green card but not full citizenship.
“People tell us they are becoming U.S. citizens to protect themselves from anything happening,” Montes said. “They hear Trump’s rhetoric and I think it really scared a lot of people. The only permanent way of never getting deported is if you’re a U.S. citizen.”
In short, Montes said, Trump has “mobilized the immigrant community.”
His statements and proposed
policies have had an impact on all Latino voters. In a recent Wall Street Journal/ NBC poll, 65 percent of likely Latino voters surveyed supported Hillary Clinton and 17 percent backed Trump. In the same poll, 80 percent of Latino voters said they had negative views of the Republican nominee.
Yessica Toral-Vital, a 31year-old Vallejo resident, falls into that category. The native of Mexico had wanted to apply for U.S. citizenship in the past but couldn’t afford the application fees, which run up to almost $700. Then she heard Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants.
Toral-Vital began putting aside money each month. She applied in the spring and gained her citizenship in July.
“I was horrified, terrified in every way. I thought I was going to get deported, he was going to split my family apart,” she said. Now she plans to vote to show that “we the people have the power, that Hispanics have a voice, and we are going to vote for people that take care of us.”
Immigration attorneys in the Bay Area recount similar experiences. Irma Perez, a lawyer in Hayward, said almost every one of her clients pushing for naturalization has cited voting against Trump as their inspiration for applying.
“Everyone I meet with asks: ‘What’s going to happen if Trump wins the presidency?’ ” Perez said. “It’s a very valid fear that they have.”
While the pace of applications this year is notable, said Jens Manuel Krogstad, a writer on immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center, there is no empirical evidence that Trump’s candidacy is behind it. Citizenship applications can rise and fall for many reasons that are political, financial or technical.
Election years, he said, typically bump up applications. And while the numbers this year are high, they aren’t unprecedented. Significantly more applications were seen in past years, such as 2007 or 1997, when application fees were on the brink of increasing or new restrictive laws were about to come into place, according to an analysis by Krogstad.
There are also plenty of practical reasons for people to apply for citizenship, such as the ability to seek federal income aid, to travel freely and to petition for legal status for family members.
Probably contributing to this year’s rise in naturalization applications is last year’s push by the Obama administration to get eligible permanent residents — a group that was estimated by the government to include about 9 million people as of 2013 — to apply. Nearly half of those people are from Latin America and almost a third are from Mexico, officials said.
A side effect of the rise in applications has been an increase in petitions that are pending — more than 500,000 as of July, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Officials said, however, that the high number of pending applications does not constitute a backlog, and that the agency is meeting its goal of processing requests within five to seven months.
Political groups opposed to Trump are hoping to take advantage of the rush for citizenship. Latino Victory, an organization focused on building political power in the Latino community, hopes a new crop of voters will help Hillary Clinton win battleground states like Florida, where nearly 100,000 citizenship applications were submitted from Oct. 1 to June 30.
“We at Latino Victory are definitely reaching out to these folks, educating them and mobilizing them,” said César Blanco, interim director of the organization and a Texas state representative.
Latino Victory does not help with naturalization applications, but tracks those who have become citizens so it can dedicate resources to them, making sure they register to vote and ultimately go to the polls.
Carol Rivera, a 34-year-old Hayward resident who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and became a citizen last month, said she won’t need to be pushed to vote.
She said she applied for citizenship in the spring as Trump gained support and emerged as a strong presidential contender. These days, she said, the Trump phenomenon and his potential ascendency are the main conversation topics in her family.
“There are a lot of immigrants that have been here for years,” she said. “We are educated. We can contribute positively to society, rally people and make positive change, so being able to vote and have it actually count toward something is huge — it’s a huge voice. I couldn’t have had that had I not become a citizen.”
“People tell us they are becoming U.S. citizens to protect themselves from anything happening. They hear Trump’s rhetoric and I think it really scared a lot of people. The only permanent way of never getting deported is if you’re a U.S. citizen.” Marissa Montes, Loyola Law School’s Immigrant Justice Clinic