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LOS ANGELES, CA – Americans who have cheated the authorities to gain United States citizenship are in for trouble.
The US government agency screening immigration applications will soon launch an office that will focus on identifying such ‘citizenship cheaters’ and will strip them of it.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIC) director Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that several lawyers and immigration officers will be hired to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and might have used fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.
Such cases would be sent to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. Chances are, government attorneys could in some cases bring criminal charges related to fraud.
New office
Till date, the USCIS has been pursuing cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said and hoped the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will open by next year. He, however, added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution could take longer.
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
He did not reveal the cost of such exercise but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.
The action comes as the Trump administration has been cracking the whip on illegal immigration and striving to reduce legal immigration to the US.
Security clearance
Immigrants who become US citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization–the process of removing that citizenship–is very rare.
The US government swung into action to study potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer found that some 200 people had used different identities to acquire green cards and citizenship even after being issued deportation orders.
In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities.
The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became US citizens under another.
Fingerprint records
The government has since then been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.
Not long ago, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.
Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the US in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and, a month later, applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.
Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.
War criminals
For many years, most US efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.
According to Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school, toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration.
The Trump administration has made these investigations a top priority, he said and added that he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.
Denaturalization cases
“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened,” Chishti said.
Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalization cases, if an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases is to be believed.
The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, said deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but is worried that other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not afford to fight back in court.
Minor discrepancy
Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the US government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.
“The people who are going to be targeted by this–they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said, adding that such citizenship cheaters will get their just deserts.