U.S. CITIZENSHIP

For nearly a decade, Yonis Bernal felt perfectly secure carrying a green card that allowed him to live and work legally in the United States.

Becoming a citizen was not a priority. He changed his mind after Donald J Trump clinched the presidency.

''All this tough talk about immigrants got me thinking. I still could be deported,'' said Mr. Bernal, 49, a truck driver who left EI Salvador in 1990 and has two teenage children.

Just last week, he was among  3,542 immigrants who raised their  right hands to take the oath at a  naturalization ceremony inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, joining a growing wave of new citizens across the country.

As. Mr. Trump campaigned on  promises of a border wall and strict crack downs on immigration, 2015 became the busiest year in a decade for naturalization applications.

But this year, the number of applications is on track to surpass that of last year's, while a perennial backlog continues to pile up.

It is the first time in 20 years that applications have not slipped after a presidential election, according to the National Partnership for New Americans, an  immigrant rights coalition of 37 pages.

And with an unrelenting stream of  hard line rhetoric and enforcement in the news, as well as a swell of citizenship drives and advocacy, there are no signs that the trend is abating.

In a year when the government has bolstered enforcement, backed curbing legal immigration and rescinded a program that protects undocumented youth deportation, even-

A Green Card is not enough in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of immigrants applying for naturalization to protect themselves from removal and gain the right to vote.

The draw of a U.S. citizenship becomes more powerful when you have the political and policy environment that you have right now,'' said Rosalind gold, a senior policy director at the Naleo Educational Fund, a national bipartisan Latino group.

About 8.8 million people are eligible to become American citizens, meaning that they have been lawful permanent residents, or had Green Card, for at least 5 years.