By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
President Obama’s administration acknowledged this weekend that it approved about 175 immigrants for citizenship without properly running their names through the FBI’s name-check databases.
That means the federal government may have missed red flags to disqualify some of them from naturalization, the Washington Times reports.
The error was blamed on computer code, affecting about 15,000 applicants.
Because of the error, the government has halted “all naturalization ceremonies already in the pipeline and banned U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers from approving new citizenship applications beginning on Nov. 29, when officials acknowledged the problem in an internal email that was later obtained by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte,” The Times wrote.
Daniel M. Renaud, associate director at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told all officers in an internal email “not to approve or oath any naturalization cases in ELIS,” referring to the Electronic Immigration System that serves as the case management system for processing applications.
“At this point we are not confident that proper FBI Name Checks have been run on certain ELIS cases. At this point we are uncertain of the scope of the problem,” he wrote.
