As Texas gears up for what could be its most competitive elections in a generation, tens of thousands of would-be voters are caught in limbo, stuck in a deep backlog of immigrants applying for U.S. citizenship.

Federal immigration officials are taking significantly longer than before to weigh applications, and some cases are now taking a year and a half or more to make it through a process that used to take about six months on average.

In Texas, the number of immigrants working toward citizenship has skyrocketed, outpacing the national surge. The latest federal numbers show that about 80,000 applications were pending in Texas at the end of June — up from about 50,000 in June 2016.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is taking steps that advocates say will make it harder still for millions of eligible immigrants to become citizens. The administration has proposed raising fees to apply for citizenship from $725 to $1,170 for most applicants, while eliminating existing waivers offered to immigrants who can’t afford to pay. The last big fee increase was in 2007, when they jumped 88 percent to $595.

Roughly a third of immigrants eligible for citizenship need the waivers, said Melissa Rodgers, program director at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit providing legal help to immigrants.

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“This is designed to price out millions of people from U.S. citizenship and to reserve U.S. citizenship for the wealthy only,” she said.

The administration says the fee increase is necessary to cover costs of the in-depth screening required to adjudicate applications. The U.S. government naturalized 833,000 new citizens in fiscal year 2019 — an 11-year high.

The Trump administration says it is devoting resources to cut down on the backlog, and attorneys in Houston say immigration officials are making an effort to get more applications through, including now doing interviews with applicants on Saturdays. About 53 percent more applications were processed in Texas between fiscal years 2017 and 2018, after two years of declines.

But advocates and Democrats say it’s too little, too late.

They see the longer wait times and the increased fees as part of a broader effort by Republicans to curb voting by minorities — including the administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, as well as state attempts to purge recent immigrants from voting rolls and add voter ID laws — to maintain control in states like Texas, where demographic shifts have long been expected to turn the political tides.

The delays have already kept some new citizens from voting in recent elections.

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Lori Gross, a 56-year-old speech and language pathologist who moved to the U.S. from Canada in 1992, had never considered moving beyond permanent resident status until Trump was elected. The country, she said, always seemed to be “humming along” and generally “moving in a good direction.”

“Then I started watching the debates, and the media coverage was so intense around this particular presidential election that I began tuning in,” said Gross, who owns a clinic in Bellaire. “The general tenor and attitude toward immigrants was very concerning to me … It was concerning to me that someone with those particular views about immigrants would become president.”

Gross applied for citizenship in August 2017, hoping to vote in the high stakes 2018 elections. But her application wasn’t approved for another 18 months — until well after the election.

Her application was among about 94,000 pending approval in Texas alone at the end of 2018, when former Democratic El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke came within 215,000 votes of beating Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

It was the closest Senate race in Texas since 1978.

Backlog spurred by wave of applications

Trump administration officials have attributed the backlog to a crush of applications for citizenship that left immigration officials scrambling to keep up.

Texas saw a 58 percent jump in applications received in the final quarter of 2016 to about 26,000 — such a surge is not unusual prior to an election as immigrants anticipate policy changes under a new administration or decide they want to vote.

Since then, the number of applications received has fluctuated, ebbing in 2017 by 10,000 and rising again at the end of 2018.

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Immigration attorneys in Houston said Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has more people taking the step to become citizens, even some who have been in the country for decades as permanent residents.

“This administration, unlike any perhaps in history, has set a tone that causes concern, broad concern, in the immigrant community — I’m talking about lawful permanent residents, in particular,” said Houston attorney Charles Foster. “That has driven people who have been on the sidelines, thinking it would be a nice thing to do someday to apply for citizenship” to finally do so.

Trump administration officials said U.S. Customs and Immigration Services has “implemented a range of process and operational reforms, hired additional staff, and expanded its facilities to ensure its ability to adjudicate keeps pace with extraordinary demand for its services over recent years.”

“The truth is that while many factors relating to an individual’s case can affect processing times, waits are often due to higher application rates rather than slow processing,” USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins said.

“USCIS strives to adjudicate all applications, petitions, and requests as effectively and efficiently as possible in accordance with all applicable laws, policies, and regulations,” Collins said.

Congress members raise alarms

This is not the first time that backlogs have developed, but past administrations have quickly shifted resources to cut them down. The Trump administration, advocates say, has been slower to react.

“It’s hard to believe it’s not deliberate,” U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat, said of the citizenship backlog and longer wait times. She and other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Texas delegation have been hammering USCIS about the delays for months.

The Trump administration has focused more on cracking down on illegal immigration, with a heavy focus on the border. Its new fee proposal would transfer $200 million from USCIS to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration, meanwhile, launched a task force to comb through files of naturalized citizens, looking for people who used fake IDs.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a letter this spring the problem had reached “crisis levels” and the Government Accountability Office is now investigating the backlog at their urging.

It’s not just Democrats concerned with the longer wait times. Republicans in the Houston area joined them in writing a letter to USCIS earlier this year, asking why immigrants in the region were waiting months longer than those in Los Angeles and New York for their citizenship applications to be processed. According to the letter, sent in March, wait times were running from 17 months to 21.5 months in the Houston area, compared to just 9. 5 months in Los Angeles and 10.5 months in Queens, New York.

According to the USCIS website, the agency has cut that wait time to about 12 to 18 months in Houston. In San Antonio, the wait time is 7 to 15 months.

Federal immigration officials in San Antonio have “told us they’re trying to do everything they can” to get through the backlog, said Elizabeth Almanza, who manages volunteer and pro bono programs at American Gateways, a group that offers citizenship and immigration services. That includes officers working six days a week and starting interviews and appointments earlier in the mornings.

Almanza said many of the clients she works with are motivated by the right to vote. They also fear what could happen to them if they don’t become full citizens now.

“There’s such a panic,” she said.

‘Our rights are being threatened right now’

Texas alone is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants currently eligible for naturalization — many of whom are considered highly likely to do so in the next few years. Many of them live in areas Democrats believe they can win in 2020.

That includes a congressional district in Fort Bend County that the party nearly flipped in 2018, now among the top targets for Democrats. The district — wide open after U.S. Rep. Pete Olson announced his plans to retire — is home to more than 32,000 immigrants eligible to become citizens, more than 9,300 of whom are highly likely to do so, according to an analysis by the University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.

Sri Kulkarni, a Democrat who came within five points of beating Olson in 2018 — in large part by reaching out directly to immigrants — lost that race by just 14,000 votes. He’s making a concerted effort to appeal to them again as he runs in 2020.

Kulkarni, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, said the district is home to many immigrants who never before felt the need to naturalize.

“People are realizing now, wait a second … Our rights are being threatened right now,” he said. “So there's a lot of people who have been applying for citizenship specifically so that they could have a say.”

The processing delays are just the latest hurdle potentially keeping immigrants from voting booths in Texas. State officials earlier this year began a purge of 95,000 people from the voter rolls, who they said appeared not to be U.S. citizens — which the secretary of state later admitted to be a vastly inflated number. Many of the names on that list were people were among the 50,000 each year, on average, who are naturalized in Texas and become U.S. citizens.

Other obstacles for new voters: Texas is one of the few states where voters still cannot register online. Identification is required at the polls, but college student IDs are not accepted. And voters must register to vote 30 days ahead of an election — even as nearly half of the states in the nation now allow them to register on election day.

Kareem Alaskary, a 25-year-old Syrian immigrant studying mechanical engineering at the University of Houston, said it makes sense the Democrats are counting on support from immigrants like him. He said he’s never met an immigrant who would vote for Trump, and while he would “never vote based on party … in the times we’re in right now, I’m definitely going Democrat.”

“And to be honest, the other party is making it easier for them to get more votes,” he said. “There’s no specific policy, but everything … whether it’s immigration policy, whether it’s birth control — all of that. Everything they’re pushing for, it’s way too far to the conservative side — which, coming from a very conservative country, I know that’s going backward, not forward.”

Alaskary has been urging his friends to vote ever since he moved to the U.S. in 2013. After becoming a U.S. citizen in October, he finally can, too. Alaskary waited 10 months to become a citizen. He said he has friends who have been waiting much longer.

“The people who are born and raised here don’t really appreciate voting as much as we do because we’ve seen how it is in other countries,” he said. “I know how far a vote can go.”