As part of the naturalization process, all aspiring candidates are required to provide their fingerprints for verification in the law enforcement databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, among others. In addition, the applicant must have his name checked across several lists to make sure no ‘hits’ reveal them to be identities or aliases of bad guys. With a thorough security check, the DHS prevents bad guys from attaining the coveted ‘citizen’ status, along with the protections they would receive under the United States Constitution. One would believe that this is the type of well-reasoned, well-supported explanation that would almost verge on being a truism. It is something that one can hardly object to these days.
So why is a little old lady threatening to go to Federal court and naming the Attorney General, the Director of the Department of Homeland Security, the Director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services, among others as co-defendants in a federal lawsuit? It just so happens that the lady comes from the Middle East and bears a Middle Eastern name.
Tough luck, you might say. Let her wait a bit longer while we make sure she is not a supporter of terror activities. You might be surprised to learn that she understood the government’s position. It would be understandable if her application were somewhat delayed because of the rigorous name check and fingerprint analyses that must be run.
But she never thought it would take eight years.
In eight years, the government had essentially bogged down her application, denying her right to be considered for naturalization as a United States citizen. No prior record; her whole family in the U.S., no history of raising a finger except to gauge the mood of the next administration. She had even passed the English language and Civics/History test. Countless inquiries deluged the Immigration Services Officers. They all came back with the same words. Words that became an exasperating death knell for her hopes of ever being truly ‘American’:
“We are awaiting a security check.”
After unsuccessfully trying all of the lower levels of the USCIS bureaucracy, we turned to our liaison contacts in the American Immigration Lawyers Association, weighed in, trying to determine the reason behind the inexplicable delay in the naturalization process. The investigations ran dry, however, and were smothered in “security check” responses.
Fortunately, when it comes to the naturalization process, the Immigration Service does not necessarily have the last word. There is a section of the U.S. Code which allows the Federal court to intervene and essentially divest the Department of Homeland Security of its jurisdiction. In other words, the court takes over the case and has a hearing where the heads of the Justice Department, the DHS and the USCIS are named as defendants and are called before the judge to justify the delay.
Now, if there is one thing an agency is loathe to do is give up its power. In a Petition for Naturalization, this is exactly what happens. A Federal Judge is given the power to naturalize the petitioner right then and then, if, in her or his judgment, the petitioner has met the requirements for naturalization to United States citizenship.
The government knows this, and rather than go through an embarrassing court procedure to justify what is essentially unjustifiable, it will sit down and take a hard look at the “sticking points” of the application. By “sticking points” I am referring to the TRUE reasons the application is being held up and the PRETEXT used to hold it up. While the true reason may be inferred by the reader (and suffered by our client) the pretext turned out to be that the USCIS could not obtain a clear set of fingerprints. That’s it. During the past seven years of an old woman’s life the only real problem was that her fingers, gnarled with age and decades of toil, could not provide good prints for the USCIS's fancy new prints machine.
The DHS stepped in and ordered that new fingerprints be taken as soon as possible and, failing a good result, that criminal background checks be run at every jurisdiction she had lived in the United States.
We presented ourselves at the USCIS field office with a mixture of annoyance and guarded optimism. We expected some new security check stumbling block. We were in for a big surprise. In a dramatic reversal of their years-long miring in red tape of the naturalization application, our client was told she had received final clearance to be naturalized.
On that same, sunny day, during a short ceremony attended by the applicant and her son, who had driven her to the appointment, our client was naturalized as a Citizen of the United States.
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