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immigration
America at 250 Should Not Put Citizenship Behind a Paywall
I have walked into hundreds of naturalization ceremonies with immigrants. I have always walked out with Americans.
Jul 04, 2026
A democracy that makes citizenship harder to reach should not pretend it is merely managing paperwork. It is deciding who gets full political voice.
I have attended naturalization ceremonies for more than three decades. I have watched courtrooms fill with nurses, engineers, truck drivers, scientists, caregivers, parents holding young children, and older immigrants who waited years to hear one sentence that would change their lives.
Before administering the Oath of Allegiance, judges often remind new citizens that American citizenship is about more than receiving a certificate or passport. It is about responsibility — to vote, serve on juries, obey the law, participate in civic life, defend the Constitution, and leave America stronger than they found it.
That reminder captures something we too often forget. Citizenship is not just a collection of rights. It is freedom joined to duty, opportunity joined to service, and belonging joined to responsibility.
A door that only the wealthy, the fluent, the well-connected, or the legally sophisticated can navigate is not truly open.
Unlike those of us fortunate enough to be born here, every person in that courtroom made a conscious decision.
They chose America.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, we should ask whether we still understand the power of that choice. One of America’s greatest accomplishments has not simply been welcoming immigrants. It has been making Americans.
Those are not the same thing.
The earliest naturalization laws reflected the exclusions and prejudices of their time. But America also preserved a revolutionary idea: a person born somewhere else could become fully American through allegiance to the Constitution and commitment to the Republic.
Naturalization was never just an immigration process. It was a democracy-building process.
Today, more than 9 million lawful permanent residents are already eligible to become American citizens. They are nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, factory workers, researchers, caregivers, veterans, farmworkers, small-business owners, and neighbors. They pay taxes, raise families, volunteer, worship, organize, serve, and build communities.
They have already invested in America. Now they are asking to invest even more deeply.
But at the very moment America should be inviting eligible immigrants into full civic membership, the government is moving in the opposite direction.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed raising the naturalization application fee from $760 to $1,330 for paper filings and from $710 to $1,280 for online filings — roughly a 75% to 80% increase. The proposal would also eliminate the reduced filing fee option and the availability of fee waivers for Form N-400.
That is not a small administrative adjustment. For many working families, it is the difference between applying now and postponing citizenship for years.
The real cost of naturalization is not just the government filing fee. It is lost wages, transportation, child care, English classes, document costs, legal help, and the anxiety of navigating a system that too often feels designed for the fluent, the wealthy, and the legally sophisticated.
For a nurse working double shifts, a home health aide caring for elders, a farmworker, a refugee parent, an elderly green-card holder, or a veteran’s spouse, the path to citizenship can become a gauntlet: higher fees, longer waits, more forms, more documentation, more scrutiny, and more fear that one mistake could derail everything.
A democracy should not celebrate citizenship in speeches while making it harder to obtain in practice.
The way we talk about naturalization matters.
For much of our history, becoming a citizen was understood as the successful completion of the immigrant journey. Today, the language too often sounds like it came from a risk-management manual: cost recovery, fraud prevention, compliance, security screening, background review, discretion.
Each of those concerns has its place. But when they become the only language we use, the future citizen slowly becomes a file, a cost, a risk, or a problem to manage instead of what he or she truly is: a future American.
A confident nation can protect the integrity of citizenship while still encouraging qualified immigrants to become citizens. A fearful nation raises costs, increases complexity, lengthens delays, narrows relief, expands suspicion, and then pretends the door is still open because it has not been formally locked.
But a door that only the wealthy, the fluent, the well-connected, or the legally sophisticated can navigate is not truly open.
When we make citizenship harder to reach, we do not just burden immigrants. We weaken democracy.
Every new citizen is a potential voter, juror, volunteer, parent advocate, union member, school-board participant, taxpayer, entrepreneur, caregiver, and community leader. Naturalization does not dilute the Republic. It strengthens it.
We should not reduce citizenship to a user fee. We should not treat qualified future citizens as customers purchasing a private benefit from government. Citizenship is different. It is the mechanism by which a democracy renews itself.
This does not mean abandoning standards. It means remembering the purpose of the standards. The goal is not to make citizenship feel like a privilege reserved for those who can survive an expensive bureaucratic maze. The goal is to welcome qualified immigrants into full participation in American civic life.
Congress and the administration should treat naturalization as civic infrastructure: protect fee waivers, invest in timely processing, expand language access, support community-based citizenship programs, simplify forms and procedures, and celebrate naturalization as one of the most important acts of democratic renewal this country performs.
At a time when Americans worry about democracy, it is remarkable that millions of people are still waiting for the chance to raise their hands, take the oath, and accept the responsibilities of American citizenship. We should not make that harder. We should honor it.
Over the years, I have watched refugees become election poll workers, veterans become citizens of the country they served, and parents beam with pride as they introduced themselves — for the very first time — as Americans.
I have walked into naturalization ceremonies with immigrants. I have always walked out with Americans.
As America turns 250, Congress should ask a larger question than how much a citizenship application should cost.
It should ask: What is a new American worth?
Every generation inherits the American experiment. Every generation decides whether to strengthen it or merely administer it. Our generation has a quieter but urgent responsibility: to remember that citizenship is not merely something government processes. It is something a great democracy cultivates.
I have never left a naturalization ceremony believing America had become less American.
I have only left believing America had become stronger.
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Rep. Joaquin Castro Says ICE Tried to Deport Families to Venezuela After Massive Quakes
"I am calling on the Trump administration to halt all deportations to Venezuela and to shut down the Dilley trailer prison," the Texas Democrat said.
Jul 01, 2026
Congressman Joaquin Castro on Wednesday accused US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials of moving to deport families to Venezuela immediately after last week's devastating earthquakes that rocked the country, killing nearly 2,000 people and wounding more than 10,000 others.
"Just hours after the devastating earthquakes in Venezuela that killed over 1,900 people, ICE attempted to deport children and families from the Dilley trailer prison to Venezuela," Castro (D-Texas) said on social media, referring to the Camp East Montana detention center at Fortb Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
"They were woken up in the middle of the night and sent to Arizona on their way to Venezuela," the congressman continued. "The families were ultimately sent back to Dilley, but worry that they could be deported at any time. It is unthinkable to send children and families, who have committed no crimes, into a country plunged into chaos by natural disaster."
Castro noted that "last week, 146 men, women, and children were deported back home to Venezuela hours before the earthquakes—many are suspected to have been killed."
On June 24, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake centered in San Felipe, Yaracuy—about 100 miles west of Caracas—was followed less than a minute later by a 7.5-magnitude temblor, whose epicenter was also in Yaracuy. Tens of thousands of people are still missing, an estimated 1,000 buildings are destroyed, and basic essential services like water and electricity remain offline in many affected areas.
"These actions are cruel and un-American," Castro said of the post-quake deportations. "I am calling on the Trump administration to halt all deportations to Venezuela and to shut down the Dilley trailer prison."
Camp East Montana, the nation's largest immigrant detention center, is operated by private prison profiteer Amentum Services Inc., which “has a history of health, safety, and other violations of federal law,” according to the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen.
Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called Camp East Montana “nothing short of a civil rights catastrophe.”
The ACLU and other groups are suing ICE and other federal agencies and officials over what the plaintiffs call "inhumane" conditions at the camp.
“Since the day it opened, the facility has repeatedly made headlines for horrific rights violations and even the deaths of three detained people, yet ICE has still evaded accountability for its conduct,” Virgien said.
Castro, who has visited Camp East Montana several times, said after touring the facility in May that “when we look back at this era in American history, we will look back in shame… of the human rights abuses, most particularly against children."
Activists, including Japanese Americans interned by the US during World War II—one of which was located at Fort Bliss—have called for the closure of Camp East Montana and other ICE facilities, which many have compared with the concentration camps in which they were imprisoned in the 1940s.
After the earthquakes, advocates have also renewed demands for the US to end its economic sanctions, which have devastated Venezuela's economy and have been blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered an illegal invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, who the US administration accuses of dubious narcoterrorism-related crimes.
While the Trump administration has issued narrow exemptions from sanctions to companies seeking to profit from Venezuela’s political crisis and copious natural resources—primarily oil—these waivers have not delivered broad relief to the people who need it most.
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Venezuelans Just Deported by Trump Among Tens of Thousands Missing After Earthquakes
As the death toll continued to rise, the US Department of Homeland Security said that "when an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them."
Jun 29, 2026
Tens of thousands of people still haven't been found after a pair of devastating earthquakes in Venezuela last week—including some Venezuelans who had just been deported from the United States as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation push and were being held in a hotel when the temblors hit, The Associated Press revealed Monday.
There were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, on a deportation flight that arrived just hours before the 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes, the AP reported, citing a Human Rights First initiative that has tracked thousands of such flights under Trump. They were brought to Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira, which collapsed because of the quakes.
"Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble from the hotel with about 20 other deportees who walked the streets looking for help. They saw people running, some naked and others barefoot as they emerged from the rubble of the building," according to the outlet.
Another deportee who survived, 24-year-old Jenny Rodriguez, told Telemundo: "I was trapped under the rubble. A colleague who had been on the same flight came by; I managed to free my hand from the debris, grabbed him by the trousers, and begged for help... Thanks to God—and to him—I was able to get out of there."
Oswadeliz Núñez Ramírez is still "frantically searching for her son," 28-year-old Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez, who was also on the deportation flight and at the hotel, the Miami Herald reported Monday. A member of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service who called himself "Jonathan" told her that he had pulled her son from the rubble, but, "skeptical of the official account, his mother has searched every hospital, clinic, and sector of La Guaira and Caracas without success."
While US Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to the AP's request for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, told the Herald: "This flight safely reached Venezuela, and all illegal aliens on board were returned home. When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them."
Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez said Monday that the earthquake has left at least 1,719 dead, 5,034 injured, and 15,866 displaced from their homes.
UN News noted Monday that the ongoing search and rescue effort involves more than 2,000 workers from over two dozen countries, plus over 160 dogs, and Gianluca Rampolla, the United Nations resident coordinator in Venezuela, "reported that the UN and Venezuelan authorities had agreed to procure 10,000 body bags in anticipation of the death toll rising further."
Rampolla said that "together with the search and rescue operations, we are focusing, together with the government, on providing emergency healthcare, shelter, food assistance, water and sanitation, and logistical support to ensure not only the storage but also the distribution of all the supplies arriving in the country, as well as protection."
As of Monday evening, more than 44,000 people remained missing, according to a reunion website for families. As NBC News detailed Monday:
Even as the chances of finding survivors diminished with every passing hour, Venezuelans continued using shovels, ropes, and their bare hands as they dug through mountains of collapsed concrete.
They were joined by a growing number of international rescue teams, who pulled multiple survivors from the wreckage, offering desperate families a rare glimmer of hope.
Among the rescues, teams from the United States, France, and Venezuela pulled a man and his son from the ruins Sunday morning after they had spent four days trapped beneath the rubble.
Organizations including US-based peace group CodePink and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, DC-based think tank, have called on the US and allied countries to lift all sanctions against Venezuela in the wake of the earthquakes.
Trump earlier this year directed an illegal invasion of Venezuela, during which US forces killed scores of people and abducted President Nicolás Maduro, then seized control of the South American country's nationalized oil industry.
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