The Obama administration announced, over the weekend, that around 175 immigrants were granted approval to receive US citizenship despite their identities not having been properly checked with the FBI database and potentially disqualified from gaining naturalization. The Department of Homeland Security officials says that the problem, which affected a total of around 15,000 applications, was caused by computer code issues.
The scale of the problem was such that the government temporarily halted all planned naturalization ceremonies. They also banned the approval of new citizenship applications by US Citizenship and Immigration Services from 29 November, when the issue was addressed by officials in an internal email later obtained by Bob Goodlatte, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
In the email, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services executive director, Daniel M. Renaud, ordered all officers not to approve or to oath any naturalization cases within the Electronic Immigration System – the case management system used for processing applications. Renaud admitted in the email that there was no confidence the correct FBI name checks had been run on many EIS cases and that the scope of the problem was currently uncertain.
The situation is another embarrassment for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. The agency admitted, earlier in 2016, to having given hundreds of ineligible criminal immigrants citizenship. Their fingerprints had not been properly checked due to the use of electronic records when thousands still remained in paper files.