“When there is a matching record, USCIS researches the circumstances underlying the record to determine whether the applicant is still eligible for naturalized citizenship”, the report says.
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The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general revealed on Monday that as many as 858 immigrants who had pending deportation orders have mistakenly been granted USA citizenship and allowed to stay in the country.
The balance sheet was published by the Department of National Security of the United States and suggests that some of the immigrants used fake names and birth dates in order to achieve US citizenship from the Immigration Service.
According to the watchdog report, the immigrants were able to get approval because their digital fingerprints were not included in DHS or Federal Bureau of Investigation databases.
An initial review suggests that some of the individuals may have ultimately qualified for citizenship, the Department Of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement.
Audio clip: Listen to audio clip. This enabled some of people to apply for citizenship under another name and in some cases even receive security clearance for jobs at airports.
The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found the immigrants used different names or birthdates to apply for citizenship with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration.
A fourth person is now a law enforcement officer.
Roth said that the DHS had agreed to the recommendations and that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had plans to digitize and upload all available fingerprint records.
According to the report, titled “Potentially Ineligible Individuals Have Been Granted U.S. Citizenship Because of Incomplete Fingerprint Records”, those individuals should not have received permanent residency status because, under their true identities, they had been ordered to be removed from the country. The immigrants weren’t busted by the government for their discrepancies because their fingerprints weren’t in the government’s databases. An additional 26 cases have been declined. “Homeland Security says it is investigating the other cases”.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told the IG’s office that the cases were not pursued because federal prosecutors “generally did not accept immigration benefit fraud cases for criminal prosecution”, the report said.
But since the fingerprint databases are incomplete, the report found that the agency had no way of knowing if the individuals were actually who they said they were.
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Immigrants are required to disclose any previous aliases they have used with immigration officials as well as their immigration history, but they sometimes omit that information. According to Roth’s report, federal prosecutors have only accepted two criminal cases that led to the immigrants being stripped of their citizenship. “Since being identified, all have had their credentials revoked”.
