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Article Launched: 09/13/2006 12:00:00 AM PDT

Second of two parts
Migrant agency falling short
Application backlog stands in millions
Sara A. Carter, Staff Writer





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While U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services gets ready to throw parties and pay bonuses to employees for reducing a backlog of applications, Mao Xiaowei and her husband Mark Hale are still waiting for her green card.
The couple were told they'd have a 90-day waiting period for her FBI name check to be returned to the immigration office. That was on Nov. 25, 2003. Ten months after that, the Hales were told by an FBI official that the name check was never received.

Three years later, at a renewal expense of more than $1,000, Mao who now goes by Vivian Hale still does not know where her application is and how much longer she'll have to wait.

Her husband, a San Jose resident, has contacted congressional members, FBI officials and Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office to find out what happened with his wife's application all to no avail.

"I would say that when you get married it's supposed to be the happiest years of your life," Mark Hale said. "We don't really know what's happened to Vivian's application. It's been nothing but frustrating."

For Vivian Hale a Chinese citizen who married Mark in 2003 and lives with her husband in San Jose thanks to being on "green card pending" status the wait, expense and uncertainty have left the author with a feeling of hopelessness.

"The whole process is very frustrating, and every year I have to go through a review," she said. "No one can give me a straight answer on where my application is."

The Hales are not alone. According to information obtained by The Sun's sister newspaper, the Ontario-based Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, from inside USCIS, the backlog of immigration applications stands at about 3.3 million, despite USCIS officials' claims that the official backlog is 140,000.

The agency is rewarding its employees for meeting a backlog-elimination deadline of October that was set by President Bush in 2003. To hit that mark, the Bulletin has learned, USCIS officials twice in the past three years redefined what is considered a "backlogged" application.

Additionally, USCIS employees say the agency is coming up short on several levels, from not providing immigration benefits to those who rightly deserve them to failing to thoroughly screen immigrant applications.

A report in Tuesday's Sun and Daily Bulletin revealed that USCIS officials designated up to $5 million for employee bonuses and office parties nationwide. In a memo obtained by the Bulletin, Michael Aytes, associate director for USCIS domestic operations, said employees who have worked with the agency since May 30 each would be awarded a $500 bonus in December that was promised by Aytes if the backlog was significantly reduced by last month.

The Aug. 30 memo also stated that up to $15 per employee would be provided for office celebrations, up to a total of $7,500 per office.

Aytes identified two sources for the money in the memo: The bonuses, which total more than $3.5 million, will be drawn from "award money that we would have typically allotted this year," while funding for the parties comes from USCIS lapse funds money not spent during the prior fiscal year.

Those funds could have been used to hire more USCIS criminal investigators or upgrade security clearances for adjudicators, said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Fullerton, who recently called for a congressional hearing about lapses in screening immigration applications green cards, work permits and other immigration documents against the government's terrorist watch list at the National Benefits Center in Lee's Summit, Mo. The newspaper first reported on problems at the center Aug. 23.

According to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General's Office, nearly 45,000 high-risk aliens from countries known to sponsor terrorism have been admitted to the United States since 2001 because of the department's inability to appropriately conduct background checks.

Royce, chairman of the House subcommittee on Terrorism and Nonproliferation, said that the internal problems at USCIS could pose a security threat to the United States.

In testimony before the committee in April, Mike Maxwell, former director of internal affairs at USCIS, told congressional members that agency supervisors and managers were holding competitions offering items from movie tickets to days off for employees in an effort to process applications faster.

Royce said congressional representatives admonished USCIS for having such a program.

Director Emilio Gonzalez told reporters at a March news conference that incentives for rapid processing of applications would not happen on his watch.

An announcement about the bonuses and parties on Monday was a slap in the face to Michael W. Cutler, a former adjudicator and investigator with the Immigration


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and Naturalization Service, which later became USCIS. Cutler testified before the 9/11 Commission and has testified at 14 congressional hearings about internal failures at USCIS.

"The agency has refused to change even after the 9/11 Commission made it clear that a terrorist exploited the system," said Cutler as he stood at ground zero in New York on Monday the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. "But they keep saying push the paperwork through. So basically these people are being given an award for leaving the door to our nation wide open.

"Of all days, to send that message and waste taxpayer money. USCIS should be ashamed of themselves."

USCIS employees interviewed by the Daily Bulletin over the past year have disclosed several problems in the agency's processing system, including:

Inadequate training of employees to appropriately access and address data provided on terrorist and criminal security lists.

Lack of information-sharing within the Department of Homeland Security and between Homeland Security and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Backlogs of immigration applications where portions of files have been sent to storage facilities, misplaced or even shredded.

Managers and supervisors ordering employees to violate the agency's standard operating procedures by not conducting background searches on aliases because of time constraints.

Employees said they were told by supervisors not to check aliases and variances on applications because it slowed production and delayed elimination of the backlog. Checking aliases and variances on foreign applications is a national security requirement under USCIS standard operating procedures.

"Before I came to work at the National Benefits Center, I used to sleep very well at night," said one employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I don't anymore. Since 9/11, I wonder when we will be attacked again. The combination of failures across the board at USCIS has left our country so vulnerable it's frightening."

In August, the newspaper reported that 75 percent of applications at the National Benefits Center resulting in a "hit" during background checks over the past four years were not properly vetted. Those hits came from criminal and terrorist databases compiled by U.S. government agencies.

Adjudicators the USCIS employees who evaluate and often decide which applications to approve said they were not properly trained on how to get additional information when an application generated a hit, and that without the extra information would not know if a terrorist or criminal was trying to apply for immigration benefits.

USCIS spokesman Jose Montero stated in an earlier interview that no benefit is ever granted to a foreign applicant unless "any hit has been completely resolved."

"No employee at the National Benefits Center or at any other U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office is allowed to investigate or resolve a national security hit," Montero said.

"Those hits are only resolved by specialized employees at the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security. To suggest otherwise is categorically wrong."

Interviews with adjudicators confirmed that until last month, many of them were unaware that their computer system contained additional information or how to access it.

If the terrorist connection was made only in the additional information, the adjudicators would have had no reason to refer the hit to the local fraud detection unit. Instead, they would have checked a box indicating the hit did not affect the applicant's eligibility benefits, then forwarded the file to field adjudicators for a final decision, according to USCIS employees and congressional testimony.

Adjudicators in the field are expected to accept the paper with the checked box as proof that the hit was resolved, according to USCIS policy, and so would grant the benefit in the absence of other information.