Quest to become American

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, April 5, 2007 | 7:11 a.m.

A year and a half after Gagandeep Suri passed his citizenship exam, a mailman came to the doctor's house at the end of a Las Vegas cul-de-sac with a letter informing him he could go downtown to the federal courthouse and be sworn in as a citizen.

But the Indian-born Suri couldn't make it - he had died seven weeks earlier.

His wife, Iran, is now two years into waiting for the same letter.

For her, citizenship has acquired a whole new meaning, the initial patriotism now laced with grief, frustration and a bit of paranoia.

Their case is not unusual , although estimates range widely about exactly how many people are affected by post-9/11 backlogs in FBI background checks.

Crystal Williams, deputy director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said as many as 200,000 people nationwide might be waiting longer than a federally mandated 120-day period after applicants pass their interviews to become citizens.

But Marie Sebrechts, spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said only 1 percent of all background checks take longer than six months from the date of application . Given that more than 700,000 applications were filed in the most recent fiscal year, that would mean fewer than 10,000 people land in situations similar to the Suris each year.

Applicants being kept in such limbo cannot vote, petition for parents to gain legal status and join family in the United States, or apply for certain jobs.

One response has been for immigration attorneys to take the federal government to court.

Locally, immigration attorney Peter Ashman has represented 10 clients on the issue in the past year, helping one Iranian man get to the last-step-in-the-process swearing-in ceremony this Friday , after a two-year wait.

"There are suits being filed all over the country ... particularly the last year," Williams said, adding that she knows of about 200 cases in court nationwide, many of which have resulted in the federal government speeding up background checks.

The suits rest on a point of law that attorneys say requires the federal government to grant citizenship to applicants within four months of passing their interviews.

But Sebrechts said the federal agency's interpretation of the law is that applicants must complete all requirements within 120 days of the interview, and the background check is one of those requirements.

The agency has changed its policy in recent months, not scheduling interviews until the background checks are completed, she said.

"We couldn't give a sure date for people to be naturalized, so we made the change so as to not have people in queue ... and in order to avoid burdening federal courts," Sebrechts said.

Meanwhile, Iran Suri waits.

The sequence of events that landed the Clark County School District special education teacher in citizenship limbo began on a 2004 European family vacation.

Iran Suri remembers how the couple took offense when people in London, Rome and Paris told them they didn't look American. Their response was to dress the children in T-shirts bearing the Stars and Stripes.

When they returned to Las Vegas, a McCarran International Airport employee said, "Welcome home."

That clinched it.

Within two weeks, the couple, who had made their home in the U.S. nearly 15 years earlier, decided to apply for citizenship. They easily aced the interview and exam in March 2005.

During the next year and a half, federal immigration authorities sent three letters to Iran and one to Gagandeep asking them to "update" their fingerprints.

When they asked about the ongoing delay, authorities said background checks weren't completed.

Several times, the family took vacations and were pulled aside for what airport officials called random checks.

"The kids would joke about it," Iran Suri said.

Then she noticed that calls from relatives in India would show a District of Columbia number on the phone's caller ID.

The widow wonders whether it's her name, an invention of her parents, who were riffing on the popular Indian name Kiran.

"I think it has to do with the spelling of my name - even though you don't pronounce it like that," she said, referring to the country.

None of it makes sense to her.

"I haven't even gotten a traffic ticket all these years," she said.

Her husband worked for nine years in internal medicine for Veterans Affairs before dying in September from complications from diabetes.

Referring to their jobs, she said, "If we're employable by federal and state governments, why aren't we safe enough to pass FBI checks and get our citizenship?"

After her husband died, their families asked whether she wanted to return to India.

"It didn't even occur to me," she said. "This is my home."

As for what's next, she said, "I haven't even thought about what would happen if they never answer.

"I believe in the American system ... (and) we've always gotten things on our own merit here . Why not this?"