Marcia Johnson: There's nothing more joyful than welcoming new citizens into our democracy and giving them the opportunity to have a voice.

Simone Leeper: This is Marcia Johnson. She's the Chief of Activation and Justice at the League of Women Voters. Marcia oversees the group's litigation, advocacy, and organizing teams. She's also a naturalized citizen and a big fan of the ceremonies where a judge swears in new citizens.

Marcia Johnson: My first ceremony was as a teenager when my family became naturalized citizens. And it's very exciting because the process to becoming a naturalized citizen is one where you have to take the exams, you're filling out applications. It's a journey, right? So when you finally get there to take the oath and swear in and to be welcomed into the American democracy, it's just a very, very special time. And there's just excitement. And there are people from all over the world who are part of this journey with you.

Simone Leeper: For years, the League of Women Voters was a reliable feature of naturalization ceremonies across the country. League volunteers and members would approach new citizens after the swearing in and help them register to vote. Then in August 2025, the Trump administration put a stop to that. The U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or USCIS barred non- governmental groups from approaching new voters at administrative naturalization ceremonies. The League of Women Voters had to cancel appearances at 166 planned events.

Marcia Johnson: It's a core part of our work. We feel that there will be harm done to new citizens who aren't given this opportunity that others have enjoyed for decades to meet new members of their community who say welcome and here's an opportunity to register and have a voice in upcoming elections.

Simone Leeper: Unfortunately, this rule change from USCIS wasn't just an isolated incident. It turns out the Trump administration has taken several such steps to make it harder for naturalized and first generation citizens to vote. So today we are asking what exactly is this administration up to and how can Americans push back on behalf of people whose freedom to vote is under threat?
I'm Simone Leeper, and this is Democracy Decoded, a podcast where we examine our government and discuss innovative ideas that can create a stronger, more transparent, accountable, and inclusive democracy. I work for Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that for 25 years has been leading a campaign to solve the wide range of challenges facing American democracy.

This season on Democracy Decoded, we're focusing on something that is at the very foundation of our country, but doesn't usually get the splashy headlines, the rule of law. When it works well, we hardly notice it. But when a presidential administration and its allies undermine or outright ignore this constitutionally enshrined cornerstone of our democracy, things start going sideways very quickly for Americans. The rule of law ensures all people are subject to the same laws and that those laws are equally enforced. As Americans, that means that no matter who our parents are and no matter where we were born, we have the same rights and freedoms as everyone else, including the freedom to vote.

Our episode today looks at American citizenship and democracy. On a number of fronts, the second Trump administration has tried to hamper Americans' freedom to vote, and over and over its efforts have targeted immigrants and their children. The rule change that kept the League of Women Voters from talking to new citizens is a good example of this.

Anna Baldwin: USCIS gave no cogent reasons for barring the League of Women Voters from conducting voter registration at these ceremonies, which they have done for decades.

Simone Leeper: This is Anna Baldwin. They're a colleague of mine at Campaign Legal Center where they are a director of voting rights litigation.

Anna Baldwin: In the last year, the League of Women Voters alone registered nearly 15% of all newly naturalized voters in the country through exactly these kinds of ceremonies. These are joyful ceremonies where people are celebrating, joining the political community in the United States, and that they have all of the freedoms and responsibilities that come with that, including the freedom to vote. And USCIS saying that the League of Women Voters won't be able to be there to answer questions from new citizens who may not be familiar with the voter registration process is making it much more difficult for these new citizens to access the franchise.

Marcia Johnson: To have someone there in the moment saying, " Here's your opportunity to register to vote."

Simone Leeper: Marcia Johnson again.

Marcia Johnson: And it's a member of your community, right? It's not just an official who's giving you that opportunity, but your community is saying, " Welcome and here's how you can have a voice." And having that taken away and having to actively search out that opportunity, so it's going to mean tens of thousands of people aren't going to have, or maybe more, aren't going to have that opportunity to immediately start the process of engaging and getting ready to vote.

Simone Leeper: Citizenship is the key that unlocks democratic participation, but the Trump administration is using it in misinformation about non- citizens as a cudgel to unlawfully erode the freedom to vote. From hampering the efforts of civic engagement groups to attempting to alter election laws or even aiming to redefine what it means to be a U. S. citizen, this administration is trying every which way to reshape the electorate more to its liking. And even this Supreme Court, which has largely been deferential to President Trump, held that the administration's actions on this front violate the rule of law and the Constitution.

Anna Baldwin: On day one of the Trump administration, the president issued an executive order attempting to illegally end universal birthright citizenship, which is the cornerstone of the 14th Amendment.

Simone Leeper: Anna Baldwin of Campaign Legal Center.

Anna Baldwin: This is really what in large part we fought the Civil War over and about what the foundation of reconstruction is, that all persons born in this country are full citizens and neither Congress nor the president nor any state can deny them any rights based on who their parents are. While historically this law was about ending racial cast for the children of enslaved people, it was written very knowingly in broad language so that it could never be again in United States history that you could have the political branches try and deny any group of people the full freedoms and rights of citizenship just because of who their parents were.
So this was the president's attempt to upturn the 14th Amendment to return to a kind of America where you had the logic of Dread Scott and that if your parents weren't citizens, you couldn't be a citizen. But that's not what the 14th Amendment says. Children born in the United States are U. S. citizens and birthright citizenship is crucial for ensuring that all Americans, regardless of who our parents are, have equal rights under the law and the opportunity to make their voices heard. The attacks on birthright citizenship are a threat to our democracy. The Supreme Court held that the executive order was unconstitutional and was contrary to a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent.

Simone Leeper: The executive order attacking birthright citizenship was clearly so far beyond the pale that it was bound to be struck down, but that is hardly the only play this administration is making. President Trump has made the SAVE Act, including its latest permutation, the Save America Act and the bill's individual components, a signature legislative priority. Over the summer, it stalled in the Senate, but if it ever becomes law, the act would require voters to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote and everyone would have to show a photo ID to cast a vote. At first, that might not sound problematic, but when you think about how many Americans don't have access to the documents they would need, like a birth certificate or a passport, you realize this act has the potential to disenfranchise a large number of voters.

Anna Baldwin: The SAVE Act would also mandate that states conduct frequent voter purges based on faulty data. And again, when you remove perfectly eligible U. S. citizens from the voting rolls, that impacts their right to vote. And when it happens too close to an election, they can completely lose their right to vote. Election workers are also threatened by the SAVE Act as well. It threatens prison time if they register somebody without the correct documents, even if the registered voter is a citizen. This is just punitive and it's meant to chill expression and political speech in the voting process.

Right now under federal law, it's already the law that only American citizens can vote in federal elections. That's the law in every state. And when you fill out a voter registration form, you sign under penalty of perjury that you are a United States citizen. There are already criminal penalties in every state in the country for making that attestation falsely. Requiring Americans to show documents to further prove their citizenship just needlessly makes it harder for eligible Americans to register and vote.

Simone Leeper: Separately, several states are pushing for more aggressive voter purges, some of which are in direct violation of the National Voter Registration Act. The broader result of these purges is to disproportionately disenfranchise naturalized citizens. So good government groups, including Campaign Legal Center, have argued in court that these state and federal measures are curtailing people's constitutional rights.

Anna Baldwin: We're currently tracking and in litigation with the State of Ohio over requirements that Ohio have to incorporate these same kinds of database checks that rely on faulty citizenship data. We've sued the State of Texas for their matching of their entire voter file with, again, these faulty federal data sources that we know erroneously flag many, many eligible U. S. citizen voters.
Voter roll maintenance is an important part of having accurate voter data. We want states and Congress wants states, Congress passed a law in 1993, the National Voter Registration Act that prioritized having accurate lists and also prioritized voter access. So it created rules for the ways that states could do kind of systematic updates to their voter files so that when people die, when they move, that there's not inaccurate data still staying on the voter rolls. But at the same time, balancing it against a number of protections to ensure that people aren't removed from the rolls who are still living in the same place, who still intend to vote and participate in their communities.

And so what we have in this instance places American citizens in real jeopardy of being removed from the rolls at a point in time, particularly when these things happen close to the election, when there's not time to correct error. When that happens, it denies qualified American citizens their freedom to vote. And that's why we're intent on making sure that under federal law, there's a period when you're within 90 days of a federal election, states aren't supposed to be able to do these large database matching voter removal programs.

Simone Leeper: We should be working to make our elections more inclusive and accessible, but the SAVE Act and some of these actions by various states do the opposite. They try to silence the voices of Americans by imposing unnecessary barriers, unfairly targeting particular segments of the population.

Cisco Aguilar: We have a President of the United States who's trying to choose his voters rather than voters choosing him, and that's not what our democracy is about.

Simone Leeper: This is Cisco Aguilar. He's Nevada's Secretary of State, the top official in the state for, among other things, running elections.

Cisco Aguilar: Our democracy is about giving everybody across this country a voice to have a say in the future of the country, whether how much money you have in your bank account, what kind of job you have, what language you speak, it's the one time every American is equal and they have an equal say in what this country looks like. And when you try to take that away, you're damaging the fabric of what we are built on as a country.

Simone Leeper: Secretaries of state like Cisco Aguilar are on the front lines of running elections. These days, they're also defending state elections from executive overreach. Only states and the U. S. Congress, not the president, get to run elections in our system.

Cisco Aguilar: The Constitution is very clear that states run their elections and we continue to fight on that basic premise. The administration and the other departments, DOJ, DHS, have tried to tell us how to run our elections and we fought back. One of the more aggressive requests they made was to capture all information on registered voters in Nevada, which included social security numbers, birth dates, and driver's license numbers. Data privacy is pretty important. Nevada did suffer a major cyber attack, one of the worst in the history of the country at the state level, shut state government down for a couple of weeks. So Nevadans are very particular about where their data is stored, how is it stored, given that experience. And when the federal government requested this information, we told them to pound sand. We're not going to give it to them. We're willing to give them the publicly available information, but not the personal information.

Simone Leeper: Unfortunately, the Trump administration wasn't deterred, and the Nevada Secretary of State's office also began to receive a series of voter- related subpoenas from the FBI. And Nevada wasn't the only state where this kind of action occurred. There has been a large scale effort by the Department of Justice to try to collect highly sensitive voter data from essentially every U. S. state.

Anna Baldwin: And any states that didn't voluntarily comply, DOJ sued more than half of them. So about 30 states, the department actually filed suit demanding that they turn over their full voter roll data.

Simone Leeper: Once again, Anna Baldwin of Campaign Legal Center.

Anna Baldwin: This is really unprecedented in that it's not as if the DOJ was investigating a particular case, a particular alleged violation of a federal statute in any one of these states. It was an across the board grab for this sensitive information. And the constitution is clear. The states and Congress set the rules around our election. There's no role for DOJ to kind of grab and construct a super voter data set, which was what they're trying to do. This kind of overreach, it doesn't make voters safer. In fact, it makes their data more dangerous. So we have, along with our partners, intervened in a number of these cases to stop the department, and in every one of the cases in which a court has ruled, DOJ has lost.

Simone Leeper: The battle over voters' information makes even the idea of voting more stressful to some people. Many are also afraid of the prospect of the federal government sending ICE or the National Guard to polling places this fall. However, a move like this by the Trump administration would be blatantly illegal.

Anna Baldwin: This is an administration that doesn't feel constrained by law. I live here in Washington DC, and we have gotten used to seeing the sight on streets every day of National Guardsmen. This is about a president wanting to show kind of militarized show of force and power and to project that kind of power onto the city. We know that the administration likes using armed troops. We know that they have used them to occupy cities like Minneapolis and Memphis and Chicago in terms of ICE. So we know that that is something that the Trump administration has turned to a tactic in the past, but we also know that it is completely and unquestionably illegal under federal law to have armed officers at polling places.

Cisco Aguilar: Them threatening to send federal agents over to engage our elections process is, again, just their attempt to intimidate, and those are big issues.

Simone Leeper: Secretary Aguilar, once again.

Cisco Aguilar: We have to stand strong. We have to be calm. Our Republican governor has stated publicly he doesn't believe federal agents should be present at polling locations. I've been in constant communication with our sheriffs throughout the state because they are the ones that are going to have to respond to this situation. What is their plan? How are we going to work together to do that? Also working with the county administrators to make sure if this does occur, your polling location managers are ready to deal with it in a calm, collected way. In Nevada, it is a felony to intimidate a voter, but it's also a felony to intimidate election worker or a poll worker.

Anna Baldwin: In this instance, I feel confident that if the administration does try and use law enforcement to be sent to polling places, that it is so clearly illegal that courts will quickly intervene. And I know the Supreme Court has not always been willing to set limits on the president's power, but this is the kind of gross overreach that I expect courts to step in forcefully if it became an issue.
Before I came to CLC, I spent 15 years in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and the roll of DOJ observers in federal elections has traditionally been, again, they're observers, they have no role other than to observe. DOJ doesn't have a right to be inside polling places if state and local governments prohibit that under their state statute or by practice. They certainly can't interfere with the voting process. They can't demand questions of voters, " Let me see your papers before you're allowed to vote." That is absolutely and unquestionably illegal.

Simone Leeper: One thing to note is there are currently very few legal restrictions on federal election observers, which were first authorized by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Until recently, it's been an important tool for documenting instances of discrimination and determining whether state and local election officials are complying with federal voting rights laws. But now, because of a harmful Supreme Court opinion and the fact that the current federal government is increasingly attempting to overreach its authority to interfere in our elections, it is more important than ever to establish safeguards on DOJ attorneys being sent to the polls.
That's why Campaign Legal Center is calling on Congress to pass legislation that would increase program transparency, clarify that the role of observers is simply monitoring and documenting compliance with federal law and establish a clear enforceable standard of conduct while providing for swift removal of observers who violate it. Even without these important reforms, it's crucial for voters to remember that current federal law protects every voter from intimidation, including by election observers.

It's easy to get caught up in some of the seemingly disastrous scenarios being put forth in the news and online, but when looking ahead to the election, Anna doesn't believe that many of these efforts by the Trump administration will be successful.

Anna Baldwin: A number of the actions that we've talked about with the voter purges certainly have a disproportionate impact on naturalized citizens where you've seen the administration in the past target places like Fulton County, Georgia. They are definitely going after voters of color because of the view that they are less likely to support the president, but some of the administration's actions are likely to backfire and hurt voters much more generally. Both Democrats and Republicans use mail voting. There are plenty of the president's own supporters who would be impacted by something like the SAVE Act if it were ever to become law.

So yes, is there an effort to try and shape the electorate and to shape the polity with something like birthright citizenship to really lock some people out of any of the rights of being a U. S. citizen? Definitely. But are those efforts being successful? No, and they may hit the president's supporters and they are just as likely to energize opponents of the administration who are offended by the attacks on the freedom to vote and become that much more determined to exercise that freedom.

Simone Leeper: If history serves as a guide, state and county election officials across the country are overwhelmingly likely to run smooth, safe elections. But in the long run, with a president testing the system at large, Congress needs to pass stronger voter protections and act as a check not just on the president, but also on the Supreme Court.

Anna Baldwin: I think we've seen a lot of challenges that have pointed to a need for real structural reform in a lot of areas as a result of just the amount of stress that the president has been able to place on our democratic structures. The birthright citizenship case should not have been as close as it was. We have to think really carefully and critically and seriously about Supreme Court reform. You had the decision that basically gutted the key remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, that is the most important civil rights legislation that Congress has ever passed. The response to the Voting Rights Act decision is to repass strong voting rights protections and also to look at Supreme Court reform to ensure that a court isn't just going to strike them down again.
So I think we're at a real pivot point in our history where we've seen some of the weaknesses as a result of our current structures, and we're going to have to do a lot of work to really rebuild the separation of powers and to push back on an executive that has grown quite greedy and have a more muscular Congress that ensures that everyone's rights are really being protected.

Simone Leeper: In the meantime, organizations like Campaign Legal Center aren't sitting on our hands waiting for reform. Together with the League of Women Voters, we sued USCIS over the rule which barred non- governmental groups from registering new voters at administrative naturalization ceremonies. After months and months of legal work by our team, including an initial preliminary injunction win over the summer, we finally won our case. Right before this episode dropped, the District Court of Maryland entered an order to permanently block the USCIS rule. Now, civic engagement groups can continue the important work of educating and registering America's newest citizens at administrative naturalization ceremonies. This longstanding tradition encourages participation in the political process and ensures that all voters can make their voices heard.

Anna Baldwin: One of the leagues who is our client in this, the Charleston County South Carolina League, at the USCIS office there, they had naturalization ceremonies five days a week and 50 weeks out of the year. And League of Women Voters volunteers covered every single one of those ceremonies for years, really celebrating and welcoming countless new citizens into the full freedom and privilege and responsibility of voting. It's a joyful thing and it's something that we should be supporting and celebrating rather than putting up barriers to.

Marcia Johnson: Voting is really the point of a democracy, right? You can't have a democracy if you're not voting and your voice isn't being expressed.

Simone Leeper: Once again, Marcia Johnson of the League of Women Voters.

Marcia Johnson: We as a voting rights community are fighting back against efforts to undermine access to the ballot. One of the things that I think about is our history. When the U. S. democracy started, it was not a democracy for everyone, and it was because people said, " No, we are going to fight back. We're going to take it to the streets. We're going to talk to our legislatures. We're going to file the litigation that we need to." That has transformed our democracy. And so this is a moment, again, where we need to do all we can to ensure we have a fulsome democracy and the democracy that we all deserve. And that means showing up to vote and engaging our legislators to make sure that our voices aren't taken away.

Simone Leeper: The fight over which citizens exactly should get to participate in American democracy is frankly beneath this country's ideals. Since the Civil War, the Constitution has unmistakably held that people born in this country are American citizens and that citizenship does not have membership tiers. Whether your family has lived here for 10 generations or you were naturalized last week, you are a full citizen. Your voice is welcome. Any efforts to quash your voice are illegal and unconstitutional. When you vote in this midterm or any future election, you should do so with the full confidence that history and the law are on your side.

Next time on Democracy Decoded, we'll further explore the state of voting rights in America as we discuss a recent Supreme Court ruling that is one of the most consequential setbacks for our multiracial democracy and a generation.

This season of Democracy Decoded is produced by JAR Podcast Solutions for Campaign Legal Center. Campaign Legal Center is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the wide range of challenges facing American democracy. For a quarter century, Campaign Legal Center has been leading a campaign for democracy in courtrooms and capitals across the country, a campaign for voting rights and fair representation, a campaign to hold our government and elected officials accountable, a campaign to limit the corrosive influence of big money in our elections, and a campaign for the rule of law so every American can participate meaningfully in the democratic process.

Today, the threats to our democracy go beyond anything we could have imagined when we first opened our doors. During this pivotal time for our democracy, Campaign Legal Center needs support to continue to fight on behalf of the American people. Your tax deductible donation directly funds our efforts to do just that. If you would like to support our work, visit campaignlegal.org and click on the donate button.

Special thanks to our guests, Marcia Johnson, Anna Baldwin, and Secretary Cisco Aguilar. I'm your host, Simone Leeper. Thanks so much for listening. If you've learned something new today, find us on your podcast platform of choice and hit subscribe. You'll get updates as we release new episodes.

Leading this production for Campaign Legal Center are Casey Atkins, multimedia manager and Madeleine Greenberg, communications associate. This podcast was produced by Sam Eifling, editing and mixing by Luke Batiot. Democracy Decoded is a member of the Democracy Group, a network of podcasts dedicated to engaging in civil discourse, inspiring civic engagement, and exploring the future of our democracy. You can learn more at democracygroup.org.