Thread: Feds Mistakenly Grant Citizenship to 800 Immigrants with Security Concerns

by BREITBART NEWS
19 Sep 2016
872 comments

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government has mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants who had pending deportation orders from countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud, according to an internal Homeland Security audit released Monday.

The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that the immigrants used different names or birthdates to apply for citizenship with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and such discrepancies weren’t caught because their fingerprints were missing from government databases.

The report does not identify any of the immigrants by name, but Inspector General John Roth’s auditors said they were all from “special interest countries” – those that present a national security concern for the United States – or neighboring countries with high rates of immigration fraud. The report did not identify those countries.

In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the findings reflect what has long been a problem for immigration officials – old paper-based records containing fingerprint information that can’t be searched electronically. DHS says immigration officials are in the process of uploading these files and that officials will review “every file” identified as a case of possible fraud.

DHS officials identified an additional 953 people who had been naturalized despite outstanding deportation orders, though auditors couldn’t determine if those immigrants had digital fingerprints on file or not.

Roth’s report said fingerprints are missing from federal databases for as many as 315,000 immigrants with final deportation orders or who are fugitive criminals. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not reviewed about 148,000 of those immigrants’ files to add fingerprints to the digital record.

The gap was created because older, paper records were never added to fingerprint databases created by both the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI in the 1990s. ICE, the DHS agency responsible for finding and deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, didn’t consistently add digital fingerprint records of immigrants whom agents encountered until 2010.

The government has known about the information gap and its impact on naturalization decisions since at least 2008 when a Customs and Border Protection official identified 206 immigrants who used a different name or other biographical information to gain citizenship or other immigration benefits, though few cases have been investigated.

Roth’s report said federal prosecutors have accepted two criminal cases that led to the immigrants being stripped of their citizenship. But prosecutors declined another 26 cases. ICE is investigating 32 other cases after closing 90 investigations.

ICE officials told auditors that the agency hadn’t pursued many of these cases in the past because federal prosecutors “generally did not accept immigration benefits fraud cases.” ICE said 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 typically apply for and receive security clearances or take security-sensitive jobs.

At least three of the immigrants-turned-citizens were able to acquire aviation or transportation worker credentials, granting them access to secure areas in airports or maritime facilities and vessels. Their credentials were revoked after they were identified as having been granted citizenship improperly, Roth said in his report.

A fourth person is now a law enforcement officer.

Roth recommended that all of the outstanding cases be reviewed and fingerprints in those cases be added to the government’s database and that immigration enforcement officials create a system to evaluate each of the cases of immigrants who were improperly granted citizenship. DHS officials agreed with the recommendations and said the agency is working to implement the changes.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...00-immigrants/

Inept. Take the citizenship away from every one of the 800 plus.

These people are incompetent. And to think they believe they are capable of vetting foreigners from the third world successfully.

Related:

http://www.alipac.us/f12/800-plus-ac...alipac-337486/

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Monday, September 19, 2016

They should have been deported, but hundreds of illegal immigrants from dangerous countries were instead granted citizenship by Homeland Security because officials never checked their fingerprints to find out their real identities, the department’s inspector general said in a staggering report Monday.

At least two of those who got citizenship have since been investigated for ties to terrorism, and two others managed to gain jobs in secure areas of airports.

Perhaps most stunning is that Homeland Security and federal prosecutors have let the illegal immigrants turned citizens get away with their potential fraud. Charges were brought in just two of the more than 800 cases identified.

The report was released as the country was learning the identity of the suspect in this weekend’s New York and New Jersey terror bombings — and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump connected the two, saying the U.S. is inviting those kinds of attacks if it can’t assure Americans it’s screening applications correctly.

“The safety and security of the homeland must be the overriding objective of our leaders when it comes to our immigration policy,” Mr. Trump said in a statement hours after the arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami, whom authorities captured after a brief gunbattle.

There is no evidence Mr. Rahami, whose family fled Afghanistan and sought asylum in the U.S., reportedly in the 1990s, was part of the hundreds who earned bogus citizenship because of bad identity checks. But lawmakers on Capitol Hill said they wanted the problem fixed immediately anyway.

The 858 cases involved people from so-called “special interest” countries, or from neighboring countries with major immigration fraud problems. Special interest countries are those places the government has identified as posing national security problems to the U.S., but the IG report did not break down how many cases were from specific countries.

“This situation created opportunities for individuals to gain the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship through fraud,” said Inspector General John Roth.

His investigators spotted another 953 cases that also seemed suspicious, but which haven’t been fully resolved yet.

Of the 858 chief cases, two have been investigated by the FBI’s terrorism task force. Another man has since been hired as a law enforcement officer, while three managed to get credentials to work in sensitive areas of infrastructure, including two who had access to secure areas of airports.

The problem, according to the audit, is tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and criminal aliens whose files are so old that their fingerprints are still on paper cards.

Some of them managed to avoid deportation and applied for citizenship anyway, using different names than those in the deportation files. They should have been caught by the fingerprint check, but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services wasn’t checking the paper files and missed them, never learning about their prior run-ins that usually made them ineligible.

In 2012 Congress carved out $5 million for Homeland Security to digitize its legacy fingerprints, and the department said it made some progress. But the money ran out before they were finished, leaving some 148,000 aliens who have been ordered deported but whose fingerprints still aren’t in the electronic IDENT system the department uses.

Homeland Security officials were ordered in the 2012 spending bill to report to Congress on how much it would cost to digitize everything. The department declined to comment on whether that happened.

“This is a picture of total incompetence,” said Sen. Ben Sasse, Nebraska Republican. “A bureaucracy that blunders so badly is one that doesn’t take our national security seriously.”

The inspector general first flagged the problem in 2008 after a Customs and Border Protection officer reported some 206 people from four danger-spot countries. Homeland Security launched an effort, dubbed Operation Janus, to try to get to the bottom of the matter.

But Operation Janus was eliminated earlier this year, and the staff disbanded.

“We received this information late in our review and cannot assess the future impact of this change,” the inspector general said in a warning.

Operation Janus had identified some 120 of the 858 immigrants whom the department deemed worthy of being prosecuted. So far, the Justice Department has only accepted two cases and refused another 26 cases.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment on why it refused those cases.

Homeland Security leaders, in their official response to the report, admitted they’d bungled by not having all the information needed to make judgments on the cases.

“As a result, USCIS was not made aware of information that may have affected the applicants’ ability to naturalize,” Jim H. Crumpacker, the Homeland Security’s liaison for investigations, said in a memo to the inspector general.

He said they’re working to get more fingerprints uploaded, and hope to issue a contract by the end of the fiscal year to tackle the problem. The department also pointed to its lack of funds to finish the digitization.

Officials insisted that some of the more than 850 applications were valid and should have gotten approval, even taking into account their fingerprints and their actual identities

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...orist-nations/

New info @

1,800 facing deportation got citizenship CNN

315,000 with criminal records or deportation orders did not have digital fingerprints on file