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INS Target of Another Alleged Citizenship Scandal
By Cheryl K. Chumley
CNS Staff Writer
November 16, 2000
(CNSNews.com) - It's 1996 all over again, Judicial Watch legal
representatives said, accusing immigration officials in Florida of rushing to
bestow citizenship upon thousands of American hopefuls in time for the
2000 presidential election.
"It's a repeat of 1996, when there was an effort to rush through citizenship
applications in order to get votes for the Democrats," alleged Tom Fitton,
president of Judicial Watch, a legal watchdog organization known for its
pursuit of the Clinton Administration.
Florida's Democrat and Republican representatives for the Miami area -
where the main Immigration and Naturalization Service district office is
located - did not return telephone calls for comment.
Washington, D.C., INS public affairs spokeswoman Elaine Komis
admitted citizenship application approvals have increased in the past few
years, but that the naturalization efforts on the part of the agency stemmed
from anti-immigration perceptions in the mid-1990s. Then, the INS
experienced a dramatic influx of requests for citizenship and was forced to
change policies in order to handle the caseloads, she said, declining to
specifically address the Judicial Watch accusations.
"There was a lot of anti-immigration sentiment [then]," Komis said.
"Proposition 187 in California expressed anti-immigrant sentiment, the
1996 welfare reforms restricted benefits to immigrants, and also in 1996,
an immigration law passed that was much more severe against immigrants
... and that caused a lot of fear in [their] communities."
As a result of that fear, Komis said, the INS received an "avalanche of
applications." An estimated 6.9 million citizenship forms were reviewed
between 1993 and 2000, she said, more than the amount received for the
"previous 40 years combined."
"We had to rebuild our structure" to accommodate that surge of
applications, and reduce the amount of time spent on individual requests
from an average of two years to less than nine months to alleviate the
backlog, she continued.
But Fitton said, "To say [the rising influx of citizen application approvals] is
from anti-immigration sentiment, it's outrageous. I don't believe they're
telling the truth, or they don't have enough information."
An INS source, whose identity he refused to divulge, reportedly told
Judicial Watch the Florida immigration agency conducted interviews
improperly by allowing prospective citizens to speak in their native
languages. The source also told the watchdog organization that at least one
alien with no "residence, family, or business ties" to America was awarded
citizenship "only three days after returning to the U.S. from an
11-and-one-half month absence from the country," in violation of INS
policies.
Whether proper background checks were conducted during the INS'
alleged attempt to speed the naturalization process is still unclear, according
to Fitton, whose agency has filed a Freedom of Information Act request
with the immigration office to gather information that might determine if
criminals were granted citizenship and if violations occurred during the
interview process.
Fitton pledges to continue his current investigation, now in its preliminary
stages, regardless of which political party wins the White House, hoping to
expose the similarities between INS activities in 1996 and the past year.
Shortly before the last presidential election, an estimated 70,000 immigrants
were reportedly prematurely naturalized, without undergoing the proper
background checks.
"It's a fact that tens of thousands of people were naturalized then that
should not have been," Fitton said. "There were e-mails emanating from the
White House, showing it was" a politically motivated effort to gather votes
for the Democrats.
If you think that these people who waltz into the country deserve to share social security, welfare benefits, free education for their kids in the language of their choice, and get subsidized healthcare, if you and the person using the nickname American Spirit put it all on your credit cards, I bet we'd get along just fine. Sounds easy to me. |
