MANY HOPEFUL RESIDENTS ARE STUCK IN LIMBO
Hopeful residents can be stuck waiting for up to 22 months
Processing times for citizenship applications in Colorado have doubled in the past three years.
Processing times for citizenship applications in Colorado have doubled in the past three years, contributing to a backlog that leaves hopeful residents in limbo for up to 22 months.
The findings headline a new report from the Colorado State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that the state has one of the largest backlogs in the country.
Nationwide, more than 700,000 citizenship applications remain stuck in the system, the report found, a wait that impacts people’s ability to vote in the 2020 election, apply for federal jobs and access public benefits. Immigration and civil rights activists said the backed-up queue is yet another example of the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants.
“These are not newcomers about whom we know nothing,” said Ming Hsu Chen, project director for the report and a University of Colorado law professor. “In the course of trying to investigate these people, they’re holding up their exercise of civil rights.”
While the backlog has increased across the country, Colorado has seen some of the largest impacts, the report found. At the end of 2018, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Field Office in Denver had more than 9,000 pending applications, researchers found. The report cited a Metro State University study showing a 132% increase in the backlog in Colorado between 2013 and 2018.
Citizenship and Immigration Services’ latest quarterly report — from Jan. 1 to March 31 — shows the number of pending naturalization applications in Colorado has decreased to just over 7,600 but the average wait time was about the same, between nine and 22 months. Pending applications nationwide remain at over 710,000.
The people in this queue have already done the hard parts of applying for citizenship, Chen said. They have fulfilled all the requirements, paid the fees and most are simply waiting on a final interview to complete the process.
“This is not a story about more denials,” Chen said. “It’s a story about taking a longer time to reach the same result.”
Nationally, wait times have jumped from an average of 5.6 months in 2016 to 10.1 months in early 2019, the report said.
Jessica Collins, a Citizenship and Immigration spokeswoman, said in a statement that the agency “continues to adjudicate the naturalization caseload which skyrocketed under the Obama administration.”
“Despite a large workload, USCIS is completing more citizenship applications, more
efficiently and effectively — outperforming itself as an agency,” Collins said in the statement.
In order to tackle the backlog, Citizenship and Immigrants Services said it has added new offices, expanded existing ones and plans to increase staff.
But immigrant rights groups say the backlog can’t simply be attributed to more applications.
“This message reverberates,” Nicole Melaku, executive director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, said. “People are not welcome to access the current pathways. This is one more barrier, one more attack on the legal immigration system.”
Melaku said her organization sees people who saved up the $725 application fee, found the resources to get the process going — only to be let down when several months go by.
The committee responsible for the report recommended that Congress increase funding for the agency, making sure that the money is earmarked for reducing the backlog. Between 2002 and 2010, Congress appropriated $574 million to reduce a backlog that had reached 3.85 million in 2004 — but no funds have been appropriated for that purpose since June 2010, the report noted.