El Senado bloquea el requisito de ciudadanía (Jun 2026)

The Senate's on June 4-5, 2026 ran for roughly 18 hours as senators considered amendments to a reconciliation bill funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol with $70 billion through 2029. Vote-a-ramas are a procedural feature unique to reconciliation: once debate time expires on a budget bill, senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments voted on in rapid succession, each with only 30 to 60 seconds of floor debate per side.

Reconciliation bills require only a simple majority to pass, 50 votes plus the vice president's tiebreaker, instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome a on regular legislation. Amendments during a similarly pass or fail by simple majority unless the Senate Parliamentarian rules they violate the , which bars non-budgetary provisions.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) offered an amendment to attach the SAVE America Act to the immigration enforcement package. The SAVE Act would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to register to vote in federal elections, and would mandate photo ID at the polls.

The amendment failed 48-50. Republicans couldn't secure a simple majority, far short of the 60 votes the SAVE Act would need under regular Senate procedure. The result was the second time in 2026 alone that the same four Republican senators blocked the bill.

Four Republicans broke with their party to vote no alongside every Democrat: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). Their opposition made the difference in a chamber where Republicans hold 53 seats.

McConnell had previously written in the Wall Street Journal that the SAVE America Act would hand a future president authority to 'use more sweeping mandates to carry out a complete federal takeover of American elections.' Murkowski stated that 'Not only does the U.S. Constitution clearly provide states the authority to regulate the times, places, and manner of holding federal elections, but one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington, D.C., seldom work in places like Alaska.'

The SAVE Act passed the House in February 2026 on a 220-208 vote, with four Democrats joining Republicans in favor. The House-passed bill is H.R. 22 of the 119th Congress, introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) in the House and sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) as S. 128.

In the Senate, the bill has never come close to the 60 votes needed to advance under normal rules. Trump publicly urged senators to attach the SAVE Act to the immigration funding package before the vote. After the amendment failed, he thanked Graham for forcing the vote and renewed calls to end the Senate filibuster to pass the SAVE Act as standalone legislation.

Proponents argue the SAVE Act closes a real gap: noncitizens who register and vote are subject to federal criminal prosecution, but the existing process relies on a perjury attestation on the federal voter registration form rather than a document check. The Heritage Foundation's election fraud database documented 77 instances of noncitizen voting between 1999 and 2023, averaging about three per year across more than a billion ballots cast.

The DHS SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database, which the bill would require states to use to verify citizenship, carries acknowledged risks. DHS itself admitted 'the SAVE Program may produce inaccurate results,' according to a May 2026 letter from Sen. Maria Cantwell to DHS. In December 2025, 70 county clerks in Missouri signed a letter calling the SAVE tool flawed, saying it regularly flagged 'individuals we know to be U.S. citizens — our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.'

Critics led by the Brennan Center for Justice, ACLU, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund argue the bill's principal effect would fall on eligible voters, not noncitizens. A 2024 survey by VoteRiders, the University of Maryland's Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, and the Brennan Center found that 21.3 million eligible U.S. voters can't quickly produce a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization certificate. Of that group, 3.8 million have no such document at all.

Voters of color face a disproportionate burden: 11% of citizens of color lack ready access to citizenship documents versus 8% of white citizens. The Center for American Progress estimates that approximately 69 million American women whose birth certificates don't match their current legal name after marriage would face an additional matching challenge at registration.

Congress enacted the of 1993, known as the Motor Voter Act, to reverse decades of declining voter registration rates by requiring states to offer registration at DMVs, public assistance offices, and by mail. President Clinton signed it on May 20, 1993. The law was designed specifically to remove administrative barriers that had historically suppressed registration among low-income voters and communities of color, who were less likely to proactively seek out registration offices.

The NVRA requires states to accept a federal voter registration form that asks applicants to attest under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona that the NVRA preempts state laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship beyond that attestation. The SAVE Act would amend federal law to override that ruling by replacing the perjury attestation with a documentary requirement for all federal voter registrations nationwide.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) managed the underlying $70 billion immigration enforcement bill through the vote-a-rama. The final bill passed 52-47 just before 5 a.m. on June 5, 2026. The bill funds ICE at $38.6 billion, Border Patrol at $22.6 billion, DHS operations at $5 billion, and child exploitation investigations at $108.5 million through the end of Trump's current term. Sen. Murkowski was the only Republican to vote against both the SAVE Act amendment and the final immigration enforcement bill.

After the vote-a-rama defeat, Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R-ND) and Sen. Laurel Lee (R-FL) introduced the SAVE America Through REAL ID Act, which repackages citizenship-verification requirements as a $50 million-per-year federal grant program for states to provide REAL ID-compliant identification. The five-year, $250 million program is structured to have a direct on-budget effect so it qualifies as a spending measure under Byrd Rule review.

Democracy Docket reported that the REAL ID approach is likely dead on arrival in the Senate, because the citizenship-verification mandates tied to the grant funding are still policy changes rather than budget measures. The four Republican holdouts haven't changed their positions.

El Senado bloquea el requisito de ciudadanía para votar de la SAVE Act por 48-50