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My office has received information concerning your registration to vote. Your registration status is being investigated because there is reason to believe you may not be a United States citizen. Listen Stop

Josue Chaparro was stunned.

With his mother at his side questioning what it meant, he tried to make sense of the letter he had received from Smith County asking him to prove what he thought was certain.

Chaparro, a pharmacy student in Tyler who was a child when his family moved from Mexico, had become a U.S. citizen in 2016. His family had sought the help of a lawyer when he began the naturalization process several years back to ensure he did “everything by the book.”

He had registered to vote at his naturalization ceremony, not long after he held up his right hand and recited an oath pledging allegiance to the country he had called home since he was 7 years old. Why then, Chaparro wondered, was the county voter registrar asking him to prove his citizenship?

His confusion morphed into frustration when he learned he was one of the almost 100,000 registered voters who state officials singled out for review using flawed data. Smith County has since agreed to hold off on scrutinizing the list of 297 individuals the Texas secretary of state’s office initially identified as “possible non-U.S. citizens” on the county’s voter rolls, and Chaparro is no longer facing a 30-day deadline to prove his citizenship so his registration isn’t canceled.

But like other naturalized citizens across Texas, he’s been unable to move past the state’s decision to flag legitimate voters like him for review. Though Texas leaders regularly opine about the sanctity of voting, Chaparro grew up in a state with a history pockmarked by efforts to disenfranchise voters of color. And amid serious concerns that the voter rolls review will suppress the votes of immigrants, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Secretary of State David Whitley — appointed by Abbott to serve as the state’s top elections officer — have defended shipping off lists of suspect voters to counties even though state election officials knew naturalized citizens would be swept up in the review.