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On a cobblestone street in the west side of South Bend sits St. Casimir Catholic Church and its adjoining school building. The school is no longer operational, so you won’t find any students inside — at least not the students you would expect.
Every Monday and Wednesday, students and volunteers arrive at the old school for 5:30 p.m. citizenship classes. Most of the students are Mexican immigrants, and most of the volunteers are local college students and older adults. For the next two hours, St. Casimir — now the site of One More Citizen, Inc. — is reinvigorated with the joyful cacophony of their voices.
“Hi, welcome!” says One More Citizen co-founder Nanci Flores one Monday in February. She’s sitting at a wooden desk in the entryway, watching from behind black glasses as students and volunteers write their names down on the sign-in sheet. (She tracks the amount of hours they spend in class partly so she can give them personalized certificates at the end of the semester.)
Flores typically remains at her desk for most of class, always ready to answer questions from students: “What forms of ID do I need for the exam?”, “Will I need to know how to explain concepts in my own words?” and even “Where can I find a divorce lawyer?”
She’s been a resource for South Bend’s immigrant community for much longer than One More Citizen has existed. Before she and cofounder Paul Hernandez started the nonprofit in 2023, she founded the citizenship program and the immigration legal clinic at La Casa de Amistad, a community center for the city’s Hispanic and Latino population. She started volunteering there as a way of giving back, since her husband is from Mexico and he and his family members are all naturalized citizens.
“I wouldn’t have the family that I have now if my father-in-law hadn’t made that journey several times across the border and finally naturalized the whole family,” Flores said.
The immense need for more citizenship education in South Bend was what made her and Hernandez decide to co-found One More Citizen, a process that went so seamlessly they attributed it to “divine guidance.”
To the right of Flores’s desk, inside the main ground-floor classroom, Hernandez signals the start of class by turning on his projector. He’s tall, bearded and gentle-natured. Like Flores, he is universally beloved by his students, each of whom he treats like family.
Before the students and volunteers start working together, he always reviews select civics questions. Tonight, they include “What was the Great Depression?”, “Why did the United States enter the Persian Gulf War?” and “Dwight Eisenhower is famous for many things. Name one.”
“Never, never, never say ‘I don’t understand,’ as [the officer is] testing your ability to understand an answer in English,” he reminds everyone.
Despite his Hispanic last name, Hernandez, a former high school English teacher, speaks very limited Spanish. He considers this one of the biggest challenges of his job, since nearly all of the current students at One More Citizen are Spanish speakers with varying levels of English proficiency.
The language barrier necessitates some creativity and improvisation on Hernandez’s part when talking to the class. For example, he calls a mental impairment, something U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers ask about during the interview portion, being “loco in the cabeza,” to the amusement of the students. And he often provides mnemonic devices in Spanish like “Bonita flora” — rose — for significant historical figures or events — in this case, Franklin Roosevelt.
The other biggest challenge for both Hernandez and Flores is the multitude of recent changes to the naturalization process that the Trump administration has enacted in the past year.
In September, USCIS announced numerous changes to the exam, including increasing the total number of possible civics questions from 100 to 128 and making many of those questions more specific and complicated. Officers now must also vet applicants for “good moral character” by asking about their “positive contributions to American society instead of a mere absence of bad behavior,” according to the USCIS website.
“USCIS at one time was a cooperative community in which they assisted you to help you become [a citizen], and now it's adversarial,” Hernandez said, adding that “anything they can do to find something to prevent you from becoming a citizen,” they will do.
To avoid having to take this updated test, applicants had to submit their applications to USCIS before Oct. 20. The influx of applications led to extremely slow processing times, and many students are now studying for exams they have no idea when they’ll take.
These changes, coupled with increased ICE activity in many major U.S. cities, have weighed heavily on Flores and Hernandez. They not only feel sad for their students, but they have to keep up with the changes to make sure they’re providing students with the most accurate information without scaring them.
“It’s affected my sleep at night, to be honest with you, because I worry about anybody who isn't a citizen,” Flores said. “And lately, I'm worried about people who are citizens too, because they're profiled.”
Hernandez said he’s also lost sleep worrying about his students, but the new roadblocks to citizenship have also made him more determined to fight for them.
“I mean, I’ll put my life in between, if that’s what it takes to … ” he said, his voice catching in his throat.
Despite everything, many students remain positive, sometimes more than Flores and Hernandez.
“I feel like our students have such a positive attitude. Like, we are cheerleaders, in a way, but they’re also very inspiring towards us. They have a much more hopeful attitude about it than I thought that they would,” Flores said.
Flores and Hernandez are inspired to keep going when they remember why they do what they do — and who they do it for.https://scholastic.nd.edu/assets/661090/fullsize/omc.jpg
Both recalled specific stories of people whose lives they’ve touched through their work.
For Hernandez, it was a man who attended a charismatic Catholic prayer group on the second floor of the school but who wanted to take citizenship classes. The only problem: they occurred at the same time.
“I think he had a little bit of a quandary of making the choice, you know, quitting the prayer group and coming here. And then after he was here, and he saw the way that the volunteers work and how everybody in here cared for one another and helped each other, he said, ‘You know what, Paul? I realized that you're doing God's work down here too,’ ” Hernandez said.
Stories like this are part of why, despite the fact that he taught high school for 38 years, Hernandez said his work at One More Citizen is more satisfying than anything else he’s done.
Flores remembered a student who hadn’t seen his family in Mexico in 20 years.
“When he became a U.S. citizen, he applied for his mom to get legal status so she could join him here. It took a few years, and he came back all those years later. He picked her up at the airport and brought her to my office, and he said, ‘I want you to know you're the reason she's here,’ ” Flores said.
As of now, students from One More Citizen have a 100 percent pass rate on the naturalization exam.
“I think always the most fulfilling thing is knowing we're able to get people through this process — knock on wood — 100 percent of the time. This isn’t even real wood, but I’m going to…” Flores said, knocking on one of the classroom tables.
In the midst of national turmoil regarding immigration, One More Citizen serves as a safe haven, and Flores and Hernandez are the backbone of the operation (though they humbly praise the volunteers for being the same thing). They help ensure that, at least for those two or four hours a week at St. Casimir, their students feel safe, welcomed and loved.
“It’s heart and soul work. It really is,” Hernandez said.
Flores added, “You know you’re changing lives.”