Citizenship Work in 2025
AFIRE has evaluated and adjusted the foundational aspects of the Citizenship Program since 2024 in order to establish the structure for what the Citizenship Program is today. This includes how to both continue streamlining an applicant’s journey and plug volunteers into our work beyond the Citizenship Workshop. Citizenship Application Preparation (CAP) Sessions continues to build foundational trust between applicants and AFIRE, and increases applicants’ preparedness and success at Citizenship Workshops. By the end of 2025, workshop volunteers support each other and a small handful are co-managing workshops alongside AFIRE staff. I’m confident that the Citizenship Program in 2026 will continue to expand and witness more growth, structure, and ultimately more accessible support to the Filipino immigrant community that is seeking U.S. citizenship. In 2025, we engaged 64 applicants through CAP Sessions. Of this pool, 35 were found eligible for citizenship at a Citizenship Workshop and were able to submit their applications.
One thing we are proud of is the impact of our CAP Sessions on our applicants and their experience with the Citizenship Workshop. In 2023, our team identified the need for additional support of Filipino citizenship applicants at NAI Citizenship Workshops. At the time, the additional support needed was primarily due to the lack of consistent Filipino language interpretation at workshops, which impacted our community’s ability to understand intake forms, documents required, and the overall workshop process and timeline. We began offering Citizenship Application Preparation (CAP) Sessions in December 2023 to designate individual time with applicants to review the citizenship application and process more thoroughly. They have become invaluable at ensuring our applicants are prepared and successfully move through the workshop. CAP Sessions also inform staff of trends within the Filipino immigrant community and the particular support needed for their immigration process. For example, there are often misunderstandings around how taxes are prepared in the Philippines and in the US. Additionally, due to marriage laws and culture between the Philippines and US, we have learned more about how Filipinos designate their marital status in the US and in the Philippines.
This year we are also learning a lot about the impact of ICE on the immigrant community. There was a particular uptick in volunteer interest in October of 2025, when ICE was regularly terrorizing the Northside of Chicago, where the AFIRE office is based. AFIRE hosted a Community Safety Planning Zoom call in November 2025, in which we shared the various ways AFIRE is able to respond to ICE in our communities and how volunteers can support that work.
-N. Henry, Citizenship Program Manager
