Hurdles delay bids to become citizens
Stricter vetting leads to growing backlog as wait times soar
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has made it more difficult to become a U.S. citizen as it has focused on more strictly vetting applicants, resulting in significantly longer wait times and a deepening naturalization backlog — but producing little evidence of widespread fraud, a report shows.
The Trump White House is taking nearly twice as long as past administrations to process citizenship naturalization applications, leaving tens of thousands of would-be citizens in limbo in Texas just months before many had hoped to vote for the first time in November elections.
There’s no clear end in sight, either, as the coronavirus pandemic and a looming budget crisis at the agency overseeing naturalization essentially have ground the process to a halt.
The new report by the Migration Policy Institute and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit focused on expanding immigrants’ rights, says the problem is systemic. The administration says it simply is applying longstanding requirements.
Under the Trump administration’s stricter scrutiny of naturalization claims, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is asking applicants to provide more supporting documents than before — going so far in some cases as to ask for proof they’ve paid off
15-year-old traffic tickets, researchers found.
Federal officials also are asking more leading questions in citizenship interviews, which may be aimed at finding reasons for denials, the report says. And they are making the English and civics tests harder than ever.
In some cases, applicants have been asked to define terms such as “communist,” “terrorism” and “genocide.”
The end result hasn’t been more denials — the administration still is approving about 90 percent of applications — but rather a deepening backlog of cases and spiraling wait times.
In Texas, wait times have skyrocketed to 12.5 months on the low end and as long as 36 months, the USCIS website shows. That wait time was about 12 to 18 months in Houston and 7 to 15 months in San Antonio late last
year.
In addition to the new requirements detailed in the report, the Trump administration also has proposed raising fees to apply for citizenship from $725 to $1,170 for most applicants, while eliminating existing waivers offered to immigrants who can’t afford to pay — something about a third of those eligible for citizenship rely on.
USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins said the report “paints longstanding requirements for naturalization candidates required by law, like demonstration of English language skills, basic civics knowledge and proof of good moral character, as obstacles.”
Collins said the administration inherited a backlog of nearly 700,000 naturalization cases from the Obama administration and is “completing more citizenship applications, more efficiently and effectively.” The U.S. government naturalized 833,000 new citizens in fiscal year 2019 — an 11-year high.
“Ensuring that candidates for citizenship are well-vetted and meet all statutory and regulatory requirements for naturalization is a standard on which USCIS cannot and will not waver,” Collins said. “We remain vigilant and uphold the security and integrity of the immigration system so that new immigrants and the public can hold in high regard the privileges and advantages of lawful presence in the United States.”
But Eric Cohen, executive director
of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said that in 30 years working as an immigration attorney, “I’ve really never seen the hurdles that this administration has been putting up.”
He added, “And for what gain? None whatsoever.”
Despite creating a task force to comb through files of naturalized citizens looking for fraud, the administration has produced little evidence of such, he said.
The report, produced by ILRC and the Migration Policy Institute, is based on a survey of 110 naturalization assistance providers across the United States.
The survey was “heavily weighted” toward California, Texas and Florida, which had the most respondents. That included 10 respondents helping immigrants applying through USCIS field offices in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.
A quarter of those surveyed said citizenship interviews had doubled in length, and 1 in 10 said interviewers were asking more leading questions about issues not directly related to citizenship eligibility, including detailed questions about travel history, such as the exact number of days traveled, the exact dates and in some cases questions about how low-income applicants were able to afford to travel.
Applicants also have faced more questions about criminal histories beyond the five-year statutory cutoff, with some having to prove they paid off traffic tickets that were more than a decade old, said Randy Capps, one of the authors of the report.
A third of the respondents said USCIS was asking for more evidence to support applications. That included a stricter scrutiny of marriage, one of the most common paths to citizenship, with new requests for details about the marriage ceremonies and who attended, including requests for pictures of the events, Capps said.