Official proof of three things — identity, age and citizenship or qualifying immigration status — is required to obtain a Social Security number.
For U.S.-born adults, required documents include a U.S. birth certificate or a U.S. passport, though most U.S.-born citizens are issued a Social Security number at birth.
Noncitizens can apply if they have U.S. permission to work in the U.S. or permanent resident status (U.S.-issued green card). Less common are nonworking immigrants, such as those issued a student visa, who need a Social Security number.
“Merely showing a bill or a school ID is not sufficient,” Kathleen Romig, a former senior adviser at the Social Security Administration, told Wisconsin Watch.
Elon Musk claimed March 30 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that “basically, you can show … a medical bill and a school ID and get a Social Security number.”
Trump administration officials did not reply to emails seeking comment.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Voting booths set up at Madison, Wisconsin's Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump Tuesday signed a sweeping executive order that overhauls the administration of U.S. elections, including requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
It’s likely to face legal challenges from voting rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general.
The order is an extension of the president’s rhetoric on the campaign trail about noncitizens voting in federal elections and his crackdown on immigration since returning to office.
Trump has often pushed back against other issues in elections administration, railing against early voting and vote-by-mail. He falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him through voter fraud.
Tuesday’s order aligns with a priority for House Republicans to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE, Act that would require proof of citizenship in federal elections. That bill, if signed into law, would codify parts of the executive order.
States are responsible for administering elections — even those at the federal level — but the order uses federal funding to compel states to follow it. Those that do not comply with the order will have federal funds revoked, according to the order.
The order directs the federal Election Assistance Commission, which distributes grants to states, within 30 days to start requiring people registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or state-issued identification that indicates citizenship.
The order also prohibits the counting of absentee or mail-in ballots that are received after Election Day. States set their own rules for ballot counting and many allow those that arrive after Election Day but postmarked before.
The order also instructs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, along with Trump megadonor Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, to gain access to state voter rolls in order to ensure the voter lists are up to date. Those entities will also have access to immigration databases and states will be allowed to request DHS to verify if any noncitizen is on the state’s list of voters.
The Department of Government Efficiency, which is not actually a federal department, has come under scrutiny for the access it has been given to Americans’ private data housed in other federal departments.
The order instructs DHS Secretary Kristi Noem within 90 days to provide the attorney general “information on all foreign nationals who have indicated on any immigration form that they have registered or voted in a Federal, State, or local election, and shall also take all appropriate action to submit to relevant State or local election officials such information.”
While noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, certain municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia, allow noncitizens to participate in local elections. If someone who is not a U.S. citizen votes, it could lead to a felony charge and subject that person to deportation.
Congressional Republicans and the president have taken aim at noncitizen voting, even though it’s extremely rare. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, conducted an analysis of election conduct from 2003 to 2023 and found 29 instances of noncitizens voting.
The Trump administration Thursday called on the U.S. Supreme Court to take action on three cases from lower courts dealing with the president's executive order ending the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. (Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Thursday called on the U.S. Supreme Court to limit the scope of three nationwide injunctions from lower courts against the president’s executive order ending the constitutional right to birthright citizenship.
It’s the first time the administration has asked the high court to intervene in cases challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that aims to redefine birthright citizenship, under which children born in the United States are legal citizens.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris is asking the Supreme Court to scale back the nationwide injunctions to apply to only the individual plaintiffs in the cases brought before federal courts in Maryland and Washington, or 18 people.
The Trump administration is asking for a full stay of a third suit filed by Democratic attorneys general in Massachusetts.
Harris argued “universal injunctions compromise the Executive Branch’s ability to carry out its functions….”
“These cases — which involve challenges to the President’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order concerning birthright citizenship — raise important constitutional questions with major ramifications for securing the border,” she wrote in her emergency request. “At a minimum, this Court should stay all three preliminary injunctions to the extent they prohibit executive agencies from developing and issuing guidance explaining how they would implement the Citizenship Order in the event that it takes effect.”
Appeals underway
The Trump administration has appealed to the 4th Circuit of Appeals the case from Maryland, brought by two nonprofits — Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and CASA — that represent five women who are currently pregnant and do not have legal status. Other individual plaintiffs belong to the two organizations.
The third case is in Washington state and the Trump administration has appealed to the 9th Circuit. It was filed by attorneys general from Arizona, Illinois, Oregon and Washington state and includes two individual plaintiffs.
The executive order that brought a flurry of legal challenges says that the federal government will not recognize or issue citizenship documentation to any child born after Feb. 19 to parents who are in the country without proper authorization, or if the parent is in the United States on a temporary visa and the other parent is a noncitizen or green card holder.
14th Amendment
The Supreme Court in 1898 upheld the 14th Amendment, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, extending birthright citizenship.
In that case, Ark was born in San Francisco, California, to parents who were citizens of the Republic of China, but had legal authority to be in the country. Ark’s citizenship was not recognized when he left the United States and he was denied reentry due to the Chinese Exclusion Act— a racist law designed to restrict and limit nearly all immigration of Chinese nationals.
The high court ruled that children born in the United States to parents who were not citizens automatically become citizens at birth.
Attorneys on behalf of the Trump administration have argued that the case was misinterpreted.
The Trump administration contends that the phrase in the 14th Amendment means that birthright citizenship only applies to children born to parents who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. That would mean, under their view, people in the U.S. without legal status or temporary legal status are “subject to the jurisdiction” of their country of origin.
In the 1920s, some Americans’ concern for a U.S. in decline led to a rise in various discriminatory policies and movements that hurt vulnerable minorities. (iStock/Getty Images Plus)
As promised, the second Trump administration has quickly rolled out a slew of policies and executive orders that the president says are all aimed at “Making America Great Again.” This takes on different forms, including Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency quickly laying off thousands of workers at various federal agencies, and President Donald Trump pausing all funding for Ukraine.
These administration efforts began at a time when many Americans expressed an overall rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country and politics. Just 19% of Americans said in December 2024 that they think the country is heading in the right direction.
This perspective is striking not only because it is so dark, but because it strongly resembles how Americans felt during a pivotal decade 100 years ago, when people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the country led to a series of discriminatory, hateful policies by the federal government.
It’s a period of American history that I think offers something of a mirror of the current political situation in the U.S.
A registry room is seen at Ellis Island in New York Harbor in 1924. (Associated Press)
They entered the 1920s with a growing sense of paranoia and a feeling that they had been robbed of something. Winning World War I had come at a terrible cost. More than 116,000 American soldiers died and twice that number came home wounded.
Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based policies at the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite immigrants and disabled people.
Among the most significant results of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration policy that, among other changes, prohibited immigration from Asia.
Another pivotal movement was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled people.
Discrimination against marginalized groups
The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a major shift in American immigration policy, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others called “race suicide.”
The law introduced rigid restrictions keeping people out of the country who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would continue to be enforced into the 1960s.
The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law were successful because they supported their effort by presenting evidence that showed purportedly scientific proof that almost all people in the world were biologically inferior to a group they called the Nordic Race – meaning people from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who formed a group they called the “American Race.”
By restricting immigration from all other groups, these legislators believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where war and pandemic had killed off what they saw as the country’s best people.
Different groups preyed on Americans’ grief about the war and pandemic and directed it against minority groups.
Ku Klux Klan members parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on Aug. 8, 1925. (Bettman/Contributor)
From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its belief that white people were superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found enormous success in persuading the public that there were scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be incorporated into American government.
Their proof was something called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.
Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.
Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they needed to justify passing the measure.
In Laughlin’s influential 1922 book “Eugenic Sterilization in the United States,” he detailed a road map for passing a law that would allow governments to sterilize disabled people.
After so much death during World War I and the influenza pandemic, Laughlin found fertile ground for making a case that the U.S. needed to stop people who might be considered “feeble-minded” from passing down inferior traits.
In the mid-1920s, Laughlin and his allies pressed a court case against a teenage woman whom the state of Virginia had deemed an imbecile and incarcerated at a massive Virginia institution for the feeble-minded. This woman, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated after she gave birth to a child in 1924 who was conceived as a result of rape. If Buck, who was 18 years old at the time, had any hope of being released, the officials who ran the institution demanded she be sterilized first.
All across the country, states had begun legalizing forced sterilization. Now, this case of Buck v. Bell made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued the court’s ruling, which had only one dissent. In it, he wrote that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” and extended the scope of a previous ruling that allowed the government to compel people to get vaccinated to include forced sterilization of disabled people.
While it is unquestionable that sterilization and other discriminatory policies found common cause with Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi movement – which used the eugenic ideas of sterilization and mass extermination – they persisted, largely unchallenged, here in the U.S.
Some people, including myself, argue that the spirit of these discriminatory policies still exists in the U.S. today.
A familiar story
Following stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the American economy has been growing.
But sensing a grave decline, some white Americans have turned their sights on people with disabilities, immigrants, transgender and nonbinary people, and people of color as the source of their problems.
Trump regularly encourages this kind of thinking. In January 2025, he blamed an air collision that occurred over the Potomac River and killed 67 people on disabled Federal Aviation Administration employees, implying that they did not possess the intelligence to do their jobs.
Trump falsely said the Jan. 1, 2025, New Orleans terror attack was caused by illegal immigration, even though a Texas-born man drove a car into a crowd of people, killing 14.
There are limits to what history can say about the current situation. But these similarities with the early 1920s suggest that, contrary to many claims about the unprecedented nature of the current times, the country has been here before.
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