For years, Republicans have insisted they aren't trying to limit voting rights for U.S. citizens. They claim to only want to protect elections from noncitizens casting illegal ballots.

That's the rationale they offer for purging voter rolls, enacting restrictive ID laws, and gathering sensitive voter data from across the country. It's the same rationale behind the SAVE Act.

We have always known that was a lie.

Now, a federal judge has called them out on it. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services tried to ban nonprofits from helping new citizens register to vote at their own naturalization ceremonies, my law firm got involved — and we won a major early ruling.

Last August, USCIS quietly reversed a policy that had, for decades, allowed nonprofit organizations to attend naturalization ceremonies and help new citizens register to vote. Instead of welcoming these efforts, the Trump administration banned them outright.

To be clear: only unquestionably eligible voters are registered under this policy. These are not noncitizens or undocumented immigrants. These are people who have literally just been sworn in as U.S. citizens by government officials.

On behalf of the National Council of Jewish Women, Greater New Orleans Section, my law firm sued. Alongside the expected First Amendment and procedural claims, we argued that the policy violated the Fifth Amendment's equal protection guarantee because it was, at least in part, motivated by intentional discrimination against naturalized citizens.

We knew this was a remarkable claim to make. But we also knew it was one that, sadly, fits the era of Donald Trump.

The evidence the court relied on is worth reading in full, because it's damning in exactly the way that matters most: it comes from the administration's own officials, in their own words.

The judge noted that in 2022, JD Vance accused Democrats of encouraging an "invasion" of immigrants to "bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters we already have." In 2024, future Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, "the White House has [an] invasion happening on purpose and it is to remake the foundation of this country."

Most tellingly, 16 days before USCIS issued the ban, its director claimed that the Biden administration had a "long-term plan… to grant some sort of mass amnesty, make them all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere throughout the country."

These weren't offhand remarks from random officials. These were the people running the government at the exact moment this policy was written and implemented.

The court also flagged something easy to miss but impossible to explain away: USCIS quietly replaced the term "naturalization candidate" with "alien" throughout its policy manual — including in provisions describing people who had already taken the Oath of Allegiance and become citizens.

A person who is legally a citizen, having just sworn allegiance to the United States, is not an "alien." They are a fellow American...