The Trump administration moves to make American citizenship more difficult with a revised civic test

The Trump administration withdrew Wednesday Wednesday to make American citizenship more difficult, announcing a list of changes to the basic civic test that immigrants must pass to be naturalized.

The changes would increase the number of questions that immigrants must be ready to answer and increase the number of questions to which they must answer properly in order to pass.

The changes, announced pending in the federal register, will largely return the test to an equally longer and more difficult version which was introduced in 2020 during the first term of President Trump, but was quickly returned under President Biden in 2021.

The change follows other modifications of the Trump administration to the process by which the managers of the American citizenship and immigration services determine whether potential citizens are qualified, including improved evaluations of their “morality” and if they attribute to “anti-American” beliefs and their intense verifications in their community ties and social networks.

This also comes in the midst of a broader repression of undocumented immigration, and what Trump said will be the greatest “massive expulsion” in American history. This effort was strongly centered in the Los Angeles region, the dismay of many Democratic leaders and immigration defense organizations.

The new naturalization test, such as the short -term 2020 version, would be based on 128 possible questions and would oblige potential citizens to answer correctly on 12 questions out of 20 in order to pass. As part of the current test, which dates from 2008, there are 100 possible questions and potential citizens must answer properly on six out of 10.

Managers of the Trump administration said that the new test “will better assess the understanding of a foreigner in the English history, government and language of the United States” and is part of a “overhaul in several stages” of the citizenship process which will guarantee that traditional American culture and values ​​will be protected.

“We do everything in our power to ensure that anyone who is offered the privilege of becoming an American citizen fulfills his obligation to his new country,” said Deputy Secretary of the Department of Internal Security, Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement.

Immigration defenders have launched the change as an attempted administration to further hamper the legal path to citizenship for workers who are already deeply rooted in the United States. They do it.

“The Trump administration renting the privileges of becoming an American citizen – while making it more difficult to obtain it – Sings Crect if we consider that it also argues before the Supreme Court that the police can profile racily Latin,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, adviser in superior to the National Immigration Law Center. “All of this is to make long -standing residents more difficult who contribute to this country every day to finally obtain the permanent protections that only American citizenship can offer.”

Earlier this month, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court ruled in a case contesting the immigration raids in California that immigration agents can stop and hold the people they suspect in the United States illegally depending on than the color of their skin, their speaking Spanish and their work in fields or locations with large labor of immigrants.

Last month, USCIS announced that it increased its verifications in the social media activity of immigrants and the search for “ideologies or anti-American activities”, including “anti-Semitic ideologies”. This announcement follows months of application against pro-Palestinian student activists and other holders of American visa and green cards who have made the alarm among constitutional academics and defenders of freedom of expression.

Trump administration officials have rejected such concerns, and others concerning raids sweeping people without a criminal record and racial profiling used to target them, within the framework of an erroneous effort of the liberals and progressives to protect undisplayful immigrants even dangerous for political reasons.

By announcing the last change in the naturalization test, Homeland Security said that it would make the test more difficult and, in so doing, make sure that “only those who are really engaged in American lifestyle are admitted as citizens”.

The Department also welcomed its recent measures to deeper the potential citizens, affirming that the new process “includes the reintegration of neighborhood interviews of new potential citizens, considering if the extraterrestrials have made positive contributions to their communities, determining a good moral character and verifying that they have never registered illegally to vote or have tried illegally to vote in an American election.

By returning to the Trump administration test – which is very similar to that newly proposed – USCIS officials under the Biden administration said that it “could inadvertently obstacle to the naturalization process”.

On the other hand, the agency under Biden declared that the 2008 test – that which Trump replaces again – was “completely developed over a multi -year period by the contribution of more than 150 organizations, which included English as an expert in second language, educators and historians, and was piloted before its implementation.”