Thread: U.S. to Skirt Green-Card Check

U.S. to Skirt Green-Card Check
Action Will Help Applicants Lacking Final FBI Clearance
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 12, 2008; A03

Facing a rapidly growing backlog of immigration cases, the Bush administration will grant permanent residency to tens of thousands of legal U.S. immigrants without first completing required background checks against the FBI's investigative files.

The change affects a large but unknown number of about 47,000 permanent residency, or green-card, applicants whose cases are otherwise complete but whose FBI checks have been pending for more than six months, U.S. officials said. Overall, about 44 percent of the 320,000 pending immigration name checks before the FBI -- including citizenship as well as green-card requests -- have waited more than six months.

The delays have been called "the most pervasive" processing problem in the U.S. immigration system, according to Prakash Khatri, the ombudsman of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The change, announced in an internal agency memorandum Feb. 4, follows years of criticism by Khatri, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, lawmakers and federal judges, who say that lengthy delays in FBI name checks serve neither national security nor immigrants, who in any case have been living in the United States for years while awaiting a decision.

Critics blame poor management and coordination at the FBI and USCIS, and the inefficient system by which the FBI keeps more than 86 million investigative files. About 90 percent of name checks are completed electronically within three months, but the rest can take years to finish through paper-based searches for any mention of an applicant's name in records stored in 265 locations nationwide.

Applicants already must clear automated checks against FBI and DHS fingerprint databases and consolidated federal law enforcement databases.

"This is a . . . step in the right direction for the government to see this name check has really been holding up thousands or tens of thousands of people unnecessarily," said Cecilia D. Wang, senior staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union's immigrants' rights project, which has tracked nine class-action lawsuits and thousands of individual suits filed by immigrants seeking faster processing.

Steven A. Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which calls for stricter limits on immigration, said the shift reflects the government's ongoing efforts to run its immigration system "on the cheap."

"You end up with people waiting longer than they should, and getting approved when they shouldn't," Camarota said. "It's bad for crime prevention, national security and customer service."

Immigration officials expect the backlog to balloon within weeks. Last summer, before a well-publicized increase in application fees, the Department of Homeland Security saw a surge of 3 million applications for naturalization and other immigration benefits -- 60 percent more than it received for all of 2006. Those cases have just started to enter the FBI pipeline.

Under the new rules, USCIS will approve otherwise completed cases when the FBI has not performed its checks within 180 days. In the instances when negative information is found -- less than 1 percent of the time, according to the bureau -- green-card holders will be deported.

USCIS spokesman Christopher S. Bentley said the agency has long wrestled with how to streamline the effort. He said the change aligns its practices more closely with those of its sister agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which admits asylum applicants into the United States before FBI name checks are completed.

The decision "just seems like a very logical way to get people who deserve benefits in a very fair and timely manner without compromising national security or the integrity of the immigration system," Bentley said.

The change does not apply to citizenship applicants because green-card holders are more easily deported, whereas "revoking naturalization is a much more difficult thing to do," he said.

Representatives of the American Immigration Law Foundation, the ACLU and other immigrant advocates hailed the change. But they questioned why it excludes citizenship applicants, when they must have lived in the United States at least three years after becoming permanent residents.

"If they really believe people pose some risk to the United States, why would they want folks inside, waiting years and years to complete the same name check?" asked Karen Tumlin of the National Immigration Law Center.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chairman of a House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said beneficiaries of the change are already living in the United States and often are married to Americans. "The card has no impact at all on security, but it may have some impact in a positive way on their lives," she said. "It's not very hard to take away the green-card status if there's an error."

Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Calif.), who seeks tighter U.S. immigration controls, objected. "Do they revoke them if they blow up something?" he asked. "There is a reason why the system was put in to do these checks, and it's national security. It's scary that we've reached a point where we're waiving that national security requirement because the bureaucracy is not responding."

Congress has approved more money to speed the FBI name checks. Gregory Smith, head of the USCIS office that coordinates name checks with the FBI, said in an e-mail to his FBI counterpart that his agency will prioritize "a significant percentage" of $20 million in new funding to expedite naturalization cases -- such as hiring 221 FBI contractors -- but "existing resources should not be diverted" from green-card checks.

The USCIS memo and Smith's e-mail were filed by the government last Wednesday in a pending case brought by immigrants before U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The memo was first reported Sunday by McClatchy Newspapers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03132.html

Homeland Security easing immigrant background checks
By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sunday, February 10, 2008 email | print tool nameclose
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WASHINGTON — In a major policy shift aimed at reducing a ballooning immigration backlog, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing to grant permanent residency to tens of thousands of applicants before the FBI completes a required background check.

Those eligible are immigrants whose fingerprints have cleared the FBI database of criminal convictions and arrests, but whose names have not yet cleared the FBI's criminal or intelligence files after six months of waiting.

The immigrants who are granted permanent status, more commonly known as getting their green cards, will be expected eventually to clear the FBI's name check. If they don't, their legal status will be revoked and they'll be deported.

The decision to issue green cards demonstrates how federal agencies are struggling to keep up with surging immigration applications while applying stringent post-Sept. 11th background checks.

About 150,000 green card and naturalization applicants have been delayed by the FBI name check, with 30,000 held up more than three years.

DHS officials are determining exactly how many are affected, but confirmed that tens of thousands of people could be eligible for the expedited procedure. The new policy was outlined in an internal memo obtained by McClatchy Newspapers. Officials said the policy will be posted this week on the department's website.

Attorneys who represent immigrants applauded the new policy and predicted green cards would be issued faster.

However, advocates of stricter immigration enforcement accused DHS of creating security loopholes, rather than solving the backlog problem.

"It's a decision driven by the bureaucratic imperative to move the line along rather than addressing national security concerns," said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. "It defies the imagination that you can require a security check only to decide that you're going to ignore it."

DHS officials said the new process does not pose any new security risks because green card applicants have been allowed to remain in the country while they wait to be screened.

"We will do nothing that cuts corners or compromises national security," said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS agency that processes green cards and citizenship. "This is something that we're doing to get benefits to people who deserve them as quickly as possible."

Immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship will continue to be required to clear the name checks before being naturalized. Officials said the requirements remain in effect for naturalization because U.S. citizenship is more difficult to revoke than a green card.

The backlog of background checks for both naturalization and green cards swelled in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks after immigration officials resubmitted 2.7 million names to the FBI.

At the same time, the bureau tightened its background check requirements. The FBI not only runs applicants' names against lists of suspects in criminal and intelligence files but also looks for names of applicants that have surfaced during the course of an investigation or any associates of suspects.

"It's a very complicated process," said Bill Carter, a FBI spokesman. "It involves dozens of agencies and databases and often foreign governments."

Adding to the backlog, a surge of applications flooded Citizenship and Immigration Services last year, prompted partly by the announcement of fee increases.

Although the FBI clears about 70 percent of the name checks within 72 hours, the bureau struggles to keep up with more than 74,000 requests per week, roughly half arising from immigration applications.

Slowing the process even more, many of the applicants who don't immediately clear are flagged for extra scrutiny merely because their names are similar to those of suspects.

Hundreds of people caught up in the backlog have sued the government to force the agencies to initiate background checks. Some of the plaintiffs have found the FBI inexplicitly clears them soon after a lawsuit is filed.

Michael Baylson, a federal judge in Philadelphia overseeing six of the lawsuits, recently expressed frustration with the government for what he described as "a strategy of favoring delay by litigation, instead of developing an orderly and transparent administrative resolution."

"Congress certainly did not intend for the process to become tortuous, expensive, mystifying and delayed, but it has," the Bush appointee wrote in January when ordering the government to explain the delays.

Critics have charged the naturalization delays could unfairly shut potential voters out of the upcoming presidential election. Last month, Emilio Gonzalez, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services at DHS, pledged to hire 3,000 new and retired employees to reduce the backlog.

Immigrant advocates question why applicants waiting for naturalization couldn't be approved before the FBI clears their names, too. Many people who apply for naturalization are green card holders who have lived in the United States for at least three years and have undergone similar background checks before.

"These people already have been scrutinized," said Daniel G. Anna, an immigration lawyer.

Two of Anna's clients, a Pennsylvania psychologist and a doctor who works at a New York veterans' hospital, have waited years to become U.S. citizens even though they have green cards. The doctor, who is from Pakistan, recently cleared the name check after she filed a lawsuit, but the psychologist, who is from Nigeria, is still waiting.

"If you're going to speed it up for green cards, then it makes sense you would do the same thing for naturalization," Anna said.

Krikorian said the better solution would be for Congress and the administration to earmark more money for both agencies to conduct the complete background checks or to reduce the number of people who are eligible for green cards or citizenship.

"The demands we've placed on the FBI for security checks is greater than their resources," Krikorian said. "We have such a tsunami of legal immigration that our infrastructure can't keep up."

McClatchy Newspapers 2008

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/27280.html

"The demands we've placed on the FBI for security checks is greater than their resources," Krikorian said. "We have such a tsunami of legal immigration that our infrastructure can't keep up."

Slow down immigration until the FBI catches up with its security checks. Revoking a green card after a tragedy is too late.