Red tape agonizing for new citizens

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Oct. 10, 2005 | 8:37 a.m.

Yolanda Castro doesn't get it.

She paid $390 and sent the application for citizenship to the federal government in early 2004, got an appointment for her interview and exam on U.S. history and politics, nearly passed out from nervousness the day of the exam in November, passed the exam anyway, and was told to wait for a letter in the mail telling her when she could be sworn in as a citizen.

Nearly a year later, she's still waiting -- an apparent victim of the post-Sept. 11 requirement for FBI background checks on all those applying to federal immigration authorities.

The problem, observers say, is that ordinary people are paying the price for a tangled bureaucracy, where efforts to protect national security sometimes drag on for years.

"It's frustrating," Castro said on a recent afternoon in her immaculate dining room while her 2-year-old daughter, Daniela, played in the back yard.

"You live right, work hard, don't ask anything from the government ..." and her voice trailed off.

"But what you can do? Who can you complain to?"

Meanwhile, the benefits citizens enjoy -- like petitioning for immediate relatives to become legal residents and then citizens, applying for certain jobs, or voting, remain out of reach for Castro.

Castro is not the only one.

"This a problem we're chasing nationwide," said Robert P. Deasy, director of liaison and information for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a Washington-based organization.

In fact, some of the organization's 4,000 members around the nation have sued the federal government, alleging that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is violating its own regulations, which they say stipulate that turnaround time for citizenship applicants who have passed their exams should be 120 days or less.

Locally, there may be dozens of people whose applications are in limbo until their background checks are completed, according to area immigration attorneys and advocates.

Marie Sebrechts, spokeswoman for citizenship and immigration services, said there were 193 people whose citizenship applications were pending in the Las Vegas area in October and 8,900 in that category nationwide as of April. Those numbers, however, include everyone who has applied and not yet become citizens without distinguishing those who have passed their exams.

The agency does not specifically keep track of people in Castro's position who have gone nearly the whole distance but are still on hold.

In her agency's defense, Sebrechts said it gets 94 percent of citizenship applications over that final hump -- applicants have passed the test and are waiting to be given a date for the swearing-in ceremony -- within a month of the interview.

"It's important to each one of them (people who are in limbo like Castro) but it's not a huge percentage," she said. Sebrechts noted that 4,800 people became citizens in the valley in the most recent fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

Bill Carter, spokesman for the FBI, said his agency's checks are "a very complicated process that involves dozens of agencies and sometimes foreign governments."

The goal, he said, is "a proper balance between security and efficiency."

Meanwhile, Kathia Pereira, a local immigration attorney, said she has seen at least 20 people who came through a nonprofit organization called the Citizenship Project wait as long as two years for their checks to be completed.

Castro was one of those people.

Pereira says she has also considered a class-action lawsuit but notes that judges may not see a legal basis for ordering someone to become a citizen before it is determined if he or she is, say, a terrorist.

"This is one of the fears an attorney faces -- that a judge will side with the federal government -- and it's (a lawsuit) time-consuming and costly."

Robert Gibbs, an immigration attorney in Seattle, filed a class-action suit more than a year ago that hasn't been resolved.

Though most of the individuals originally named in the case finally had their background checks cleared and became citizens during that time, new clients have appeared with the same problem, Gibbs said.

His attempts to find out what the hold-up is on those checks are useless, he said.

"It's like you don't know if the Wizard of Oz has gone to lunch or fallen asleep or fallen off his chair."

Timothy Pratt can be reached at (702)259-8828 or timothy@lasvegassun.com.