There is something almost philosophical happening at the borders and naturalization offices of the United States right now. The question of who gets to be American has always generated heat. But in 2025 and into 2026, the Trump administration has moved from political rhetoric to concrete, sweeping policy action in ways that are reshaping the legal architecture of citizenship and immigration in this country.
This is not simply a story about undocumented immigration. The policies described here directly affect people who have followed every legal rule, waited every required year, and still find themselves navigating a system that has been fundamentally rearranged beneath their feet. Some of those people showed up to swear an oath of allegiance and were turned away at the door. Others were processed and removed. Others received letters telling them their temporary protection had been revoked.
What follows is an account of how those changes happened, what they mean in legal terms, and where the courts and policymakers stand as of 2026.
Birthright Citizenship: A Constitutional Confrontation
Executive Order 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” was signed by President Trump on January 20, 2025. The order aims to challenge the prevailing interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, seeking to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized immigrants as well as immigrants legally but temporarily present in the U.S., such as those on student, work, or tourist visas.
Specifically, the order would deny citizenship to persons born from a mother who was unlawfully present in the United States and whose father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the child’s birth, or when the mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and the father was also not a citizen or permanent resident.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, states plainly that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a nationwide preliminary injunction in February 2025, writing that the order “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year-old binding Supreme Court precedent” and was likely to be found unconstitutional.
At least ten lawsuits challenging the executive order were brought by various plaintiffs, including 22 U.S. state attorneys general, civil liberties and immigrant rights groups, and pregnant women. By February 2025, four federal judges had issued preliminary injunctions blocking its implementation and enforcement nationwide.
The Supreme Court eventually weighed in, though not yet on the core constitutional question. In Trump v. CASA, decided June 27, 2025, the Court voted 6-3 to limit the ability of lower courts to issue universal injunctions. That ruling, however, did not settle the underlying citizenship dispute. Trump’s order has never gone into effect; every federal court that considered a challenge to it has struck it down.
The stakes are high. Excluding children born in the United States under the order would create a permanent underclass of people who have never been to another country and may be rendered stateless. A child stripped of citizenship would be denied Social Security cards and U.S. passports, and their access to critical federal programs like CHIP, SNAP, and Medicaid would be jeopardized. According to research from the Migration Policy Institute, repealing birthright citizenship would actually increase the unauthorized population by 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075, the opposite effect from what the order’s supporters intend.
The Transformation of USCIS
From a Benefits Agency to an Enforcement Arm
The Trump administration is transforming U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency known for processing green cards and citizenship requests, into one of its strongest anti-immigration policing arms. Traditionally, its employees focused on the various ways people can lawfully immigrate and stay in the U.S., including applying for asylum, a green card, citizenship, work visas, or other legal pathways.
Reports of arrests and detention following routine USCIS interviews and appointments increased fear among immigrants. Signs inside USCIS offices urge people to leave the country, mirroring the tone of a detention center rather than that of an immigration office, according to immigration lawyers.
The New Citizenship Test
One of the most concrete changes to the naturalization process has been the overhaul of the civics test. The 2025 version expands the question bank to 128 items, increasing the number of questions asked during interviews from 10 to 20, with a passing score of 12 correct answers. Under the previous standard, participants were required to answer six of 10 questions correctly.
USCIS posted a Federal Register notice implementing the 2025 naturalization civics test, describing it as one of many steps in an ongoing effort to “restore integrity to the naturalization process and meet congressional intent.” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, explaining the changes to NPR in October 2025, said the old test was “just too easy” and that simpler questions about holidays or geography were not sufficient.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Program at the Migration Policy Institute, noted that the new test is being implemented as the Trump administration has pulled back funding for English and civics education, making it harder for some noncitizens to prepare. She added that combined with new requirements around “good moral character” and the reimplementation of neighborhood checks for some applicants, it seems likely that a smaller share of naturalization applicants will be successful going forward.
The Drop in Naturalizations
The data already shows the impact. The total number of completed citizenship applications went from 78,379 in September 2025 to just 37,832 by January 2026. By November, the number of people applying to naturalize dropped to 41,478; by January 2026, that number ticked up slightly to 46,385, still almost a 50% drop from the prior year.
In December 2025 and continuing into 2026, some people were shocked to find 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.
According to NPR, as one analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice observed, “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. That unpredictability creates a real sense of fear.”
The Travel Ban and Country-Level Freezes
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 series of restrictions. The halt came after an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., in late November 2025.
For those from travel ban countries, pending applications for immigration benefits, including green cards and naturalizations, were paused indefinitely. Approved immigration benefits may also be re-checked for those who arrived after January 20, 2021, and green card holders from travel ban countries may have their status reviewed regardless of when they arrived.
Trump also revoked the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had entered the U.S. via alternative temporary legal pathways created by the Biden administration to extend protections for particularly vulnerable populations. As a result, hundreds of thousands of individuals already in the U.S. who were otherwise eligible to obtain or maintain lawful immigration status find themselves in legal limbo.
Deportation at Scale
Interior Enforcement Surges
The story of immigration enforcement in the first year of the second Trump administration is a story of a drastic increase in interior enforcement, meaning enforcement that occurs within the United States, usually far from the border. Interior deportations surged to more than four and a half times their pre-inauguration level.
The Department of Homeland Security announced that as of December 2025, more than 2.5 million people had left the U.S., with DHS enforcement operations resulting in more than 605,000 formal deportations since January 20, 2025. Independent analysts, however, have raised serious questions about those figures. The Center for Migration Studies called the DHS’s broader self-deportation claim “a self-serving fantasy,” describing it as based on a flawed interpretation of population data, and estimated that actual self-deportations for the year were roughly one-tenth of what DHS claimed.
Data from the Deportation Data Project at U.C. Berkeley offers a more granular picture. Before Trump took office, ICE was carrying out roughly 300 arrests per day, nearly two-thirds of which involved people held in jails or prisons at the time. A far smaller number, roughly 75 per day, occurred outside custodial settings.
Who Is Being Targeted
Despite administration messaging that enforcement focuses on “the worst of the worst,” more than one out of three people deported from detention in 2025 had no criminal record at all. Just 2% of those deported were tagged as suspected gang members in ICE data, and among those with a criminal conviction, the majority (64%) had nothing more serious than a misdemeanor.
Courts ruled more than 4,400 times that the Trump administration was detaining people illegally, and several U.S. citizens were detained and deported.
Perhaps the most high-profile individual case involved Kilmar Armando Abrego García, a Salvadoran with legal withholding-of-removal status in the United States, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador on March 15, 2025. The Trump administration admitted this was an “administrative error.” Despite a legal prohibition on his removal to El Salvador due to the risk of persecution, he was transferred to the country’s Center for Confinement of Terrorism. His wife, a U.S. citizen, filed a lawsuit, and on April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court ordered the government to facilitate his return.
Refugees and Temporary Protection Status
In 2025, the Trump administration announced it planned to slash refugee admissions to the U.S. for 2026 to a record low of 7,500 refugees, down from a cap of 125,000 for 2025. For fiscal year 2026, the administration set the refugee admissions ceiling at 7,500, the lowest since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, with a focus on Afrikaners from South Africa. During the first three months of FY 2026, only 720 refugees were resettled, and 99% of them came from South Africa.
In November 2025, the administration also ordered a review of approximately 230,000 refugees admitted under the Biden administration and halted green card processing for refugees who entered during that period.
In early February 2026, Trump announced a plan to end temporary legal protections for approximately 350,000 Haitian migrants living in the United States. The policy aimed to terminate their protected status and subject them to standard immigration procedures. However, a federal judge subsequently blocked the implementation of this plan.
The “Gold Card”: Residency for Sale
In a move that runs parallel to the administration’s enforcement crackdown, a new pay-to-play residency pathway opened in December 2025. President Trump officially launched the “Trump Gold Card” visa, a new immigration pathway that allows foreigners to pay $1 million to expedite their visa application, or have companies pay $2 million to sponsor a foreign worker they want to bring into the U.S.
A successful applicant receives lawful permanent resident status as an EB-1 or EB-2 visa holder. Unlike the previous EB-5 program, which mandated an investment in a commercial project that created or preserved 10 U.S. jobs, the Gold Card removes any direct job-creation requirement. Candidates simply contribute $1 million directly to the government in exchange for permanent residency after security vetting.
In tandem with the Gold Card, President Trump signed a proclamation raising the H-1B visa application fee to $100,000, an increase expected to significantly impact companies’ ability to hire foreign workers under the H-1B program.
The program has had a slow start. Only 165 applicants had paid the processing fee required to participate in the program, according to a DHS filing reviewed in connection with ongoing litigation over the program’s legality. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a congressional committee that as of late April 2026, only one person had been fully approved, though “hundreds are in the queue.”
The program has faced legal challenges from advocacy groups and academics who argue it conflicts with existing employment-based visa categories. It is also the subject of a federal lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., by the Democracy Defenders Fund and other groups, which accuses the Trump administration of withholding records about the Gold Card under the Freedom of Information Act.
The implicit contrast is not lost on observers. The administration faces challenges in managing the optics of rolling out the red carpet to welcome wealthy foreigners at the very same time it is actively detaining and deporting large numbers of immigrants of lesser means.
The Economic Dimension
The cumulative effect of reduced legal immigration carries consequences beyond individual families. Trump’s immigration policies likely resulted in net zero or negative immigration in 2025, according to a Brookings Institution study. The same research concludes that reduced immigration will dampen labor force growth and consumer spending, contributing to a 0.2% drop in GDP in 2025 and a 0.1% drop in 2026.
Research published by the Center for Global Development found that an average recent immigrant without a high school degree has a lifetime positive net fiscal balance of $128,000. When including expected children and grandchildren, the lifetime positive net budgetary effect rises to $326,000, with immigrants holding higher levels of education showing an even more positive balance.
Reduced legal immigration, particularly of high-skilled workers, is also expected to impact U.S. competitiveness and innovation.
Courts, Congress, and the Limits of Executive Power
Throughout this reporting, one recurring pattern is judicial resistance. A U.S. district court judge in July 2025 ruled one immigration proclamation illegal, stating he failed to find any statute or constitutional provision that gave the president the authority to “adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted.” On April 24, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld that ruling.
Across multiple fronts, the Trump administration’s actions have tested the limits of executive power. The New York City Bar Association has been tracking these actions in detail, noting legal challenges in categories ranging from travel bans to birthright citizenship to the revocation of parole programs.
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What This Means for You
The breadth of what has changed in U.S. immigration and citizenship law since January 2025 is difficult to overstate. What was once a relatively predictable, rule-bound legal system has become, for many immigrants and visa holders, deeply uncertain. Here is what the record shows as of 2026.
Birthright citizenship, a right embedded in the 14th Amendment and upheld by courts for over 125 years, remains blocked by an executive order that has been struck down at every level of the federal judiciary so far, though the legal fight continues. The naturalization process has been made harder: a longer test, stricter “moral character” assessments, neighborhood investigations, and reduced English and civics education funding all make the pathway to citizenship more difficult for lower-income and lower-literacy applicants. Naturalizations dropped by nearly 50% in the months following the new restrictions.
Interior deportation enforcement has expanded to a scale not seen in this century, and data shows that a substantial portion of those deported had no criminal record. At the same time, a new pay-to-reside program offers wealthy foreigners a fast track to permanent residency for $1 million, which critics and some immigration attorneys have described as a fundamental reorientation of what access to America means. Refugee admissions have fallen to their lowest level since the modern refugee program began. And the economic research is consistent: reduced immigration, particularly of working-age legal immigrants, carries measurable costs to GDP, labor supply, and long-term fiscal health.
If you or someone you know holds a visa, green card, or pending application, the most important thing to do right now is consult a qualified immigration attorney about how specific rule changes may affect your case. Deadlines have shifted, interview standards have changed, and some protections that existed as recently as 2024 no longer apply. Staying informed is not enough. Getting personalized legal guidance has become essential.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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