COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
After the War, a New Battle to Become Citizens
FERNANDA SANTOS, New York Times
February 24, 2008
Despite a 2002 promise from President Bush to put citizenshipapplications for immigrant members of the military on a fast track,
some are finding themselves waiting months, or even years, because of
bureaucratic backlogs. One, Sgt. Kendell K. Frederick of the Army,
who had tried three times to file for citizenship, was killed by a
roadside bomb in Iraq as he returned from submitting fingerprints for
his application.
About 7,200 service members or people who have been recently
discharged have citizenship applications pending, but neither the
Department of Defense nor Citizenship and Immigration Services keeps
track of how long they have been waiting. Immigration lawyers and
politicians say they have received a significant number of complaints
about delays because of background checks, misplaced paperwork,
confusion about deployments and other problems.
"I've pretty much given up on finding out where my paperwork is,
what's gone wrong, what happened to it," said Abdool Habibullah, 27,
a Guyanese immigrant who first applied for citizenship in 2005 upon
returning from a tour in Iraq and was honorably discharged from the
Marines as a sergeant. "If what I've done for this country isn't
enough for me to be a citizen, then I don't know what is."
The long waits are part of a broader problem plaguing the immigration
service, which was flooded with 2.5 million applications for
citizenship and visas last summer twice as many as the previous
year in the face of 66 percent fee increases that took effect July
30. Officials have estimated that it will take an average of 18
months to process citizenship applications from legal immigrants
through 2010, up from seven months last year.
But service members and veterans are supposed to go to the head of
the line. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush signed
an executive order allowing noncitizens on active duty to file for
citizenship right away, instead of having to first complete three
years in the military. The federal government has since taken several
steps to speed up the process, including training military officers
to help service members fill out forms, assigning special teams to
handle the paperwork, and allowing citizenship tests, interviews and
ceremonies to take place overseas.
At the same time, post-9/11 security measures, including tougher
guidelines for background checks that are part of the naturalization
process, have slowed things down.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which checks the names of
citizenship applicants against those in its more than 86 million
investigative files, has been overwhelmed, handling an average of
90,000 name-check requests a week. In the fiscal year that ended in
September, the F.B.I. was asked to check 4.1 million names, at least
half of them for citizenship and green card applicants, a spokesman said.
"Most soldiers clear the checks within 30 to 60 days, or 60 to 90
days," said Leslie B. Lord, the Army's liaison to Citizenship and
Immigration Services, the federal agency that processes citizenship
applications. "But even the soldier with the cleanest of records, if
he has a name that's very similar to one that's in the F.B.I. bad-boy
and bad-girl list, things get delayed."
Such explanations are why Mr. Habibullah has decided that once he
does become a citizen if he ever becomes a citizen he will change
his name.
"I figured that's part of the reason things got delayed," he said.
"You know, that I have a Muslim name."
Thousands of Muslim civilians have also found themselves waiting
months or years for background checks, and have filed a class-action
lawsuit in federal court in Denver. But advocates for the immigrant
service members said that those with pending applications are from a
variety of backgrounds and that they do not suspect a pattern of
discrimination against Muslims.
Some 31,200 members of the military were sworn in as citizens between
October 2002 and December 2007, according to the immigration service,
but a spokeswoman, Chris Rhatigan, said she could not determine how
long it took for them to be naturalized since the agency does not
maintain a database tracking military cases.
Over all, 312,000 citizenship or green card applications are pending
name checks, including 140,000 that have been waiting more than six
months, immigration officials said. This month, immigration
authorities eased background-check requirements for green cards,
saying that if applicants had been waiting more than six months, they
could be approved without an F.B.I. check, and approvals could be
revoked later "in the unlikely event" that troubling information was found.
After hearing complaints from at least half a dozen service members
over the past three months, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York
has drafted a bill to create a special clearinghouse to ensure that
applications from active and returning members of the military are
processed quickly and smoothly. A spokesman said several other
lawmakers reported hearing many similar stories.
"These are men and women who are risking their lives for us," Mr.
Schumer said in a telephone interview. "They've met all the
requirements for citizenship, they have certainly proved their
commitment to our country, and yet they could lose their lives while
waiting for a bureaucratic snafu to untangle."
In interviews, immigration lawyers and military officials said that
in general, the naturalization process takes service members between
six months and a year, which is about half the current average wait
for civilians. But some cases drag on much longer because of
background-check delays or because applications are misplaced, or
notices are mailed to stateside addresses after an applicant has been
deployed, causing appointments to be missed.
"You try to resolve these things amicably, reaching out to the
military, reaching out to immigration officials, but you hit
roadblock after roadblock," said David E. Piver, a Pennsylvania
lawyer who filed at least six petitions in federal court over the
past five years on behalf of service members experiencing longer than
usual delays on their citizenship applications.
"It's usually not any substantive issue that's causing those delays,"
he said. "What it boils down to are bureaucratic snafus."
Feyad Mohammed, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago who lives with
his parents in Richmond Hill, Queens, was naturalized last month
four years after he filed the first of four citizenship applications,
and six months after his honorable discharge from the Army as a sergeant.
Mr. Mohammed first applied in 2004, after he returned from the first
of his two tours in Iraq. But the application seemed to have been
lost; when he checked after a few months, he said, no one at the
immigration service could tell him where it was or even if it had
been received. He filed again in 2005, but missed his interview
several months later; it had been scheduled in Iraq, during his
second combat tour, but he was home on leave on the appointed day.
After he was discharged in July 2007, Mr. Mohammed filed another
application. The paperwork was returned because he had not included a
check covering the processing fee, he said, ignoring a Bush
administration initiative that exempts combat veterans from
application fees for up to a year after discharge. It was then that
Mr. Mohammed reached out to Senator Schumer's office, which helped
him file a fourth, and final, time.
When he was sworn in Jan. 25 at the federal courthouse in Downtown
Brooklyn, Mr. Mohammed said, he felt "relieved."
"I was a citizen," he said. "I could finally move on with my life."
But Sergeant Frederick, a 21-year-old immigrant from Trinidad, would
be awarded citizenship only posthumously, on the day of his burial.
He is one of more than 90 immigrant service members to be naturalized
after losing their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Sergeant Frederick's mother, Michelle Murphy, said that he had filed
his citizenship application a year before he was deployed to Iraq in
2005, but that his application was sent back to her Maryland home
three times once because of incomplete biographical information,
again because he had left a box unchecked, and once more because he
had not paid the fee.
Finally, Ms. Murphy said, Sergeant Frederick received a letter saying
that the fingerprints he had included with his application could not
be read and that he needed to submit new ones. She contacted
immigration officials, who arranged for him to submit a new set of
fingerprints on Oct. 19, 2005, near his base in Tikrit. On the way
back from the appointment, his convoy hit a roadside bomb.
"If somebody is fighting for a country, if he's deployed, if he's in
the middle of a war, it shouldn't be that hard for them to become a
citizen," Ms. Murphy, 42, said in a telephone interview.
After his death, the immigration service began accepting enlistment
fingerprints with service members' citizenship applications, provided
applicants authorized the military to share their files with
immigration officials. A bill to make such sharing automatic has been
passed by the House and is pending a final Senate vote.
In the meantime, Mr. Habibullah is working as an aircraft hydraulics
mechanic in Connecticut, though he hopes to get a better-paying job
in the federal government once he is naturalized. In October, Mr.
Habibullah's father and grandmother became citizens in separate
ceremonies, though they applied fully two years after he did.
Mr. Habibullah has passed the citizenship test and been interviewed,
and he said he does not know what to do to move his application
through the backlog faster.
"Every time I ask about it, I get the same answer: it's pending the
background check," Mr. Habibullah said as he looked over his military
medals, which are displayed on a wall in the Mount Vernon, N.Y.,
apartment he shares with his wife and 1-month-old son. "I'm at the
point right now that I've almost given up on it."
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