DOJ Revokes Naturalized Citizenship, Citing Fingerprint Issue
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday that it canceled a person’s naturalization certificate, revoking his citizenship and reverting him to a lawful permanent resident. The move potentially makes him subject to deportation.
Baljinder Singh, also known as Davinder Singh, is the first casualty of “Operation Janus,” a joint operation by the DOJ and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It appears that because USCIS failed to use fingerprint records effectively, those who have been granted citizenship without proper fingerprint records, meaning before fingerprints were digitized, may now be subject to having their citizenship revoked.
Operation Janus began because USCIS granted citizenship to “at least 858 individuals ordered deported or removed under another identity when, during the naturalization process, their digital fingerprint records were not available,” according to a document released by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General, in September 2016. “The digital records were not available because although USCIS procedures require checking applicants’ fingerprints against both the Department of Homeland Security’s and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) digital fingerprint repositories, neither contains all old fingerprint records. Not all old records were included in the DHS repository when it was being developed.”
Operation Janus may revoke the citizenship of thousands of people, according to DHS. These are people who will have been U.S. citizens for decades.Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to have identified nearly 150,000 older fingerprint records “of aliens with final deportation orders or who are criminals or fugitives” that have not been digitized. The FBI repository is missing records because “not all records taken during immigration encounters were forwarded to the FBI,” DHS reported. The DOJ is investigating 315,000 cases in which people were granted citizenship without the proper fingerprint data available, and USCIS intends “to refer approximately an additional 1,600 for prosecution,” the DOJ reported.
DHS has warned that “as long as the older fingerprint records have not been digitized and included in the repositories, USCIS risks making naturalization decisions without complete information and, as a result, naturalizing additional individuals who may be ineligible for citizenship or who may be trying to obtain U.S. citizenship fraudulently.”Operation Janus does not bode well for the thousands of immigrants who have had to navigate the U.S.’ complicated, lengthy, and costly immigration system.
https://rewire.news/article/2018/01/09/justice-department-revokes-naturalized-citizenship-citing-fingerprint-issue/
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I got my naturalization papers in 1964. Have no idea if they have been digitized.
This is fucking stupid!
