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Johanan Rivera considered becoming a U.S. citizen for years, but it was never a priority. Rivera, an immigrant who still has family in Mexico, worried that naturalization would make him feel like he was losing his "Mexicanness," and he was content to live in the United States as a permanent resident.

But in February 2025, after 15 years in the United States, Rivera finally applied to naturalize. He became a U.S. citizen about a year later.

"The second Trump administration came into office, and [my partner and I] wanted more certainty about being able to live in the same country," he told NPR in an interview on the day of his March naturalization ceremony at the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. "It's been the result of political change that pushed forward the process."

Newly released data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes citizenship applications, shows that 2025 was marked by fluctuations in applications for naturalization and a drop in people being approved to become citizens.

Immigration experts said the trends show in real time how President Trump's restrictive immigration policies, ramped-up deportation efforts and increased scrutiny have affected people at the tail end of their legal immigration journey.

While 2025 began with high rates of citizenship applications submitted and decided, by the end of the year fewer immigrants were applying to become citizens — and even fewer were granted access to this final milestone, according to the data. The downward trend in recent months, experts and former officials said, reflects a decline in faith in America's immigration system.

"The fear is pretty pervasive," said Felicia Escobar Carrillo, former USCIS chief of staff under the Biden administration. "I think that people are just going to think twice about whether to apply."

During the first few months of Trump's second term, the administration approved a record-high number of naturalizations. At the peak of 2025, 88,488 applications were approved in one month — the largest number since USCIS began tracking month-by-month naturalization data in 2022.

But by January of this year, that number had dropped to 32,862, the lowest since USCIS began tracking that data.