On March 18, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) closed all of its field offices to public-facing activities due to the coronavirus, effectively putting much of legal immigration to the United States on pause, including naturalization interviews and oath ceremonies. As the months went by, other federal and state agencies turned to virtual infrastructure for their activities, but USCIS held out and insisted that its activities could only be done in person.
In her story, published in FiveThirtyEight, grantee Eileen Guo looks at how this has jeopardized the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents just months away from citizenship, and how third party voter registration organizations are doing their best to make up for some of the losses.