Following is summary of this Associated Press article:
The U.S. Government has mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants from “countries of concern to national security,” an internal Homeland Security audit reported Monday. The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that the immigrants used different names or birthdates to apply for citizenship and the discrepancies weren’t caught because their fingerprints were missing from government databases.
The report does not identify any of the immigrants by name or the countries they came from, but Inspector General John Roth’s auditors said they were all from “special interest countries” which present a national security threat to the United States, or neighboring countries with high rates of immigration fraud.
The emailed statement said the findings reflected a longstanding problem of old paper-based records containing fingerprint information that can’t be searched electronically. DHS says immigration officials are in the process of uploading those files, and officials review “every file” identified as a case of possible fraud.
The report says fingerprints are missing from federal databases for as many as 315,000 immigrants that have final deportation orders or are fugitive criminals.
The government has known about the information gap since at least 2008 when a Customs and Border Protection official identified 206 immigrants who used different names or other information to gain citizenship or other benefits, but few cases have been investigated.
ICE officials generally haven’t pursued many of those cases in the past because federal prosecutors “generally did not accept immigration benefits fraud cases,” but ICE says that the Justice department has now agreed to focus on cases involving people who have acquired security clearances, jobs of public trust or other security credentials.
Mistakenly awarding citizenship to someone ordered deported can have serious consequences, because U.S. citizens can apply and receive security clearances and take security-sensitive jobs.
At least three of the immigrants-turned-citizens were able to acquire aviation or transportation worker credentials and access secure areas of airports or maritime facilities and vessels, and a fourth person became a law enforcement officer. Their credentials were revoked after they were identified as having received citizenship improperly, said the report.
The report recommended that all of the outstanding cases be reviewed and the fingerprints from those cases be added to the government’s database.