Black added, “It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that this audit follows reports from just last week indicating that the Department of Homeland Security may have withheld data from lawmakers showing a drastically different security situation at the US-Mexico border than what DHS portrays”.
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The U.S. government erroneously granted citizenship to almost 1,000 immigrants who had previously been ordered to be deported, according to a report released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.
The majority of Donald Trump supporters say immigrants here illegally should be allowed to stay while 24 percent of all likely voters say they should be forced to leave the country, according to a new Quinnipiac University national poll.
Fingerprint records are said to be missing because paper-based fingerprint cards used before 2008 were not consistently digitized, the report says. Not all old records were included in the DHS repository when it was being developed.
Fingerprints are missing from federal databases for as many as 315,000 immigrants with final deportation orders or who are fugitive criminals, according to Roth’s report. Fingerprints were not always consistently forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it said.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement saying it will look into the 1,811 individuals wrongly granted citizenship.
Just two criminal cases have led to immigrants being stripped of their USA citizenship, with prosecutors refusing to renounce 26 others.
“At least three [people granted citizenship] were found to have been conducting security-sensitive work at airports or maritime facilities”. They were naturalized after being ordered to be removed from the country, because different agencies with their fingerprints hadn’t linked their records.
Illegal immigrants from Guatemala, who were deported from the USA, wait while collecting their belongings from immigration officers processing their re-entry at La Aurora airport in Guatemala City, August 14, 2014. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not reviewed about 148,000 of those immigrants’ files to add fingerprints to the digital record.
Investigators recommended establishing a plan for evaluating each of the new naturalized citizens who used multiple identities.
It is believed ICE officials have not examined many other cases because they “did not accept immigration benefits fraud cases”.
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“The fact that fingerprint records in these cases may have been incomplete at the time of the naturalization interview does not necessarily mean that the applicant was in fact granted naturalization, or that the applicant obtained naturalization fraudulently”, the spokesman noted. DHS officials agreed with the recommendations and said the agency is working to implement the changes.
