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  1. #1
    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    Trump administration launches bid to catch citizenship cheaters

    Trump administration launches bid to catch citizenship cheaters

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna says his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and
    immigration officers to review cases.


    Jun.11.2018 / 3:34 PM ET / Updated 3:48 PM ET / Source: Associated Press


    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington on Dec. 12, 2017.
    Kevin Lamarque / Reuters file

    LOS ANGELES — The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.

    Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants' citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.

    Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency's new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.

    "We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place," Cissna said. "What we're looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases."

    He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency's existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.

    The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.
    Immigrants who become U.S. citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization — the process of removing that citizenship — is very rare.

    The U.S. government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.

    In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants' identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.

    Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.

    Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.

    Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.

    Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.

    For many years, most U.S. efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.

    Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at New York University law school.

    The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.

    "It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened," Chishti said.

    Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalization cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.

    The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.

    Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the U.S. government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.

    "The people who are going to be targeted by this — they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on," Cissna said. "It may be some time before we get to their case, but we'll get to them."

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...eaters-n882166


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  2. #2
    Moderator Beezer's Avatar
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    EXTREME VETTING

    MAKE IT EXPENSIVE

    AND BOOT THEM OUT!

    WE WANT IT ALL STOPPED!
    ILLEGAL ALIENS HAVE "BROKEN" OUR IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

    DO NOT REWARD THEM - DEPORT THEM ALL

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    EXCLUSIVE: NEW USCIS OFFICE INVESTIGATING THOUSANDS WHO GOT US CITIZENSHIP THROUGH IDENTITY FRAUD

    12:33 AM 06/13/2018Will Racke | Immigration and Foreign Policy Reporter

    45 71

    A new government office created to investigate bogus naturalization applications estimates there are at least 3,000 cases of aliens who used false identities to obtain U.S. citizenship, federal officials told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    The office, housed inside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has identified the potential fraud cases as a part of its ongoing review of more than 300,000 fingerprint records uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database beginning in 2014.

    Based on the review to date, officials could uncover more than 3,000 instances where an ineligible alien assumed another identity and used it to become a U.S. citizen, USCIS associate director for field operations Daniel Renaud told TheDCNF Tuesday in an interview.

    The targeted review stems from a 2016 DHS inspector general report that found roughly 315,000 old fingerprint records for people who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a DHS database of immigrants’ identities. As immigration authorities enrolled the paper records into the DHS system, they discovered hundreds of cases where an alien with an order of removal under one name had been naturalized under another identity.

    The records in question were taken by the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1990s and early 200os, before DHS’s biometric database — IDENT — was created. Because the fingerprints were not subsequently added to IDENT, it would have been much easier for a previously deported or otherwise ineligible alien to successfully obtain immigration benefits with a fake identity, Renaud explained.

    Immigration authorities have reviewed 167,000 of the formerly missing records to date, and about 2,000 of them matched names of people who have naturalized, according to USCIS officials. Of that number, an estimated 1,600 — or 80 percent — of the naturalizations appear to be fraudulent. If that rate holds, USCIS estimates there will be another 1,400 to 1,600 naturalization fraud cases within the second batch of 148,000 fingerprint records, Renaud said.

    USCIS Director Francis Cissna revealed the creation of a special office to deal with the potential crush of cases in an interview with the Associated Press published on Monday. The office will fall under the agency’s Los Angeles district and is expected to comprise dozens of attorneys and immigration officers with years of experience handling naturalization cases.

    “The new USCIS office in southern California will serve as a centralized location to review and initiate the civil denaturalization process against individuals who had been ordered removed and intentionally used multiple identities in order to defraud the government and the American people to obtain citizenship,” USCIS spokesman Michael Bars said in a statement.

    The new office builds on the work of a similar unit that USCIS set up in its Los Angeles field office in January 2017. Although that team of about a dozen officials is much smaller than the new office is expected to be, it has managed to refer 95 cases to the Department of Justice for civil denaturalization, according to USCIS figures provided to TheDCNF.

    That number is expected to rise as the agency begins “moving forward in a much larger way” on denaturalization cases, Renaud said.

    The creation of an office to investigate potential naturalization fraud does not change how cases are ultimately resolved. Current law requires a USCIS official to prepare an affidavit of good cause, which the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation uses to file a civil lawsuit against a person who is alleged to have fraudulently obtained citizenship. Denaturalization cases are heard in federal court and only a judge has the authority to strip someone of U.S. citizenship.

    Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department has pursued a series of high-profile denaturalization cases against people who lied to immigration officials while applying for citizenship.

    Prosecutors in February filed a civil complaint to strip U.S. citizenship from a diversity visa-lottery winner who lied about illegally funneling cash to a subject of U.S. sanctions during his naturalization interviews. Later that month, federal attorneys filed similar actions against five convicted child molesters who lied about their criminal histories during the naturalization process.

    More recently, federal judges in April revoked the citizenship of a Somali immigrant who obtained green cards for herself and fake family members, as well as an Egyptian-born man who provided logistical support and recruited for al-Qaida.

    http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/12/al...ke-identities/
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