Federal officials were forced to cancel naturalization ceremonies this week after discovering a flaw in the immigrant background check system, according to an email obtained by House lawmakers.
“Effective immediately offices are instructed not to approve or oath any naturalization cases in [the Electronic Immigration System],” a U.S. Customs and Immigration Services Official wrote in an email to colleagues. “We have identified an issue with FBI Name Checks initiated through ELIS. At this point we are not confident that proper FBI Name Checks have been run on certain ELIS cases.”
The email acknowledged that USCIS is “uncertain of the scope of the problem.” The ELIS is the online portal through which immigrants apply for a range of benefits, such as green card renewals and naturalization.
“As you know, the FBI Name Check process is an integral and absolutely necessary part of the immigration benefits adjudication process,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote in a letter Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, in reaction to the email. “No applicant should be approved prior to such a check being completed in and with a result showing no concerns.”
Goodlatte wants to know how many naturalization ceremonies were affected and how many flawed background checks took place. But he’s also frustrated at immigration officials, accusing them of a lack of transparency with congressional overseers.
“I am troubled by the fact that as the Chairman of the Committee of jurisdiction over USCIS, I was not informed about this epic USCIS failure to ensure that immigration benefits applicants were properly vetted as required by law,” he wrote. “Your agency made no effort to notify me of this problem. Instead, I was only made aware of it by a confidential source.”
The flap figures to add to a broader political debate between Republicans and Democrats over whether the U.S. government is capable of adequately vetting Syrian refugees. “This vetting of refugee applicants involves collecting biometric info, doing in-person interviews, doing background checks, running their info through a variety of national security and international databases,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters in August.
