Legal immigration: Red tape snags ID checks

It was springtime when Asad Khan and his wife, Uzma, drove from their Gilbert home to Phoenix to be interviewed by government officials as part of their quest to become U.S. citizens.

Watch a video of Asad Khan, a Pakistani man who lives in Gilbert

Watch a video of Mohammed AbuHannoud, USCIS director for the Phoenix district

Watch a video of Rober Okin, civil rights director for the Arizona Chapter of the Council on Islamic-American Relations

On the same day, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services checked off “box A” on Uzma Khan’s application.

“Congratulations!” the response to her application states. “Your application has been recommended for approval.”

Within a few months, she took her oath to become a citizen.

But Asad Khan was not so fortunate.

The agency checked off a box on his application that basically left him in limbo. It reads: “A decision cannot be made about your application.”

Asad Khan’s interview took place March 16, 2006. More than a year later, he is still awaiting a decision. The holdup boils down to one major snag: His name has not yet been cleared by the FBI, which checks for ties to terrorist groups and other anti-American organizations before an immigrant can become a citizen.

“They are not preventing me from living here, and they are preventing me from becoming a citizen,”said the 42-year-old Pakistani. “But if I become a citizen, what would be the difference as far as security is concerned?”

The FBI’s National Name Check Program has been causing headaches for many immigrants like Khan.

The FBI has always conducted routine background checks on people seeking immigration benefits, but the events of Sept. 11, 2001, made the process longer. About a year after the tragedy, USCIS asked the FBI to re-examine all of its applicants before granting any more immigration benefits. In December 2002, it returned about 2.7 million names to the FBI for additional checks.

That caused a massive backlog for the agency, which already receives 67,000 namecheck requests a week from more than 70 federal and state agencies.

In addition, the name checks now take longer than before Sept. 11 because the FBI has broadened the scope of its search. As a result, people trying to become residents and citizens the legal way are finding the path long and arduous.

“After 9/11, we not only searched the main subject files, but we also searched our reference files, which greatly expands our search and the time it takes,” said Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman. “You are searching not only to see if this individual was the subject of our investigation, but if at any point this individual surfaced in an investigation.

“That greatly increases the chance of someone getting a hit on their name.”

Although government officials say the name checks do not target people of certain races or religions, many in the Muslim community feel theirs are the majority of the names that produce “hits” in the database.

Immigration lawyers say the bulk of their clients who come seeking legal assistance because of security checks are of Middle Eastern descent.

“We’re not in a business of denying anyone ... a benefit they are entitled to,” Bresson said. “We are trying to do the best we can with the resources we have and I can tell you unequivocally, we do the process ... without any regard to ethnicity or religious affiliation.”

But the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has received so many complaints from the Phoenix area about namecheck delays, it decided to hold evening meetings about immigration to help answer questions.

“We believe in strong security,” said Mohammed Abu-Hannoud, the civil rights director of CAIR Arizona and a Mesa resident. “But the other question is how can we be supportive of strong security if this prevents law-abiding residents who are paying taxes and contributing to the wealth of this country from becoming citizens?”

Currently, the FBI has 222,110 name checks for USCIS that have been pending for 120 days or more. By law, USCIS gets 120 days to decide whether or not to grant citizenship. There are no time restraints on granting green cards or asylum.

USCIS spokeswoman Marie Thérèse Sebrechts said the name-check process is extremely important to the nation’s security and about 80 percent of them are resolved within a few weeks.

“USCIS is responsible for protecting the integrity of our immigration system by ensuring that no one takes advantage of our hospitality to do us harm,” she said.

Still, the delays can have a big impact on peoples’ lives.

Mesa resident Ahmad Ewais, a legal immigrant who first came to the U.S. 14 years ago, said he was not able to attend his mother’s funeral in Jordan two years ago without the risk of losing his residency status. He had not seen his mother since 1993, he said.

Although he applied for his green card in 2001 and had his interview in April 2005, his name had still not cleared the FBI database.

He tried writing to the Department of Homeland Security to ask the agency to expedite the name check, but without success.

“This is a humane issue,” he said. “You cannot prevent people from seeing their family. My father. My mother. My brothers and sisters. I haven’t seen them in a while. I’m a human being. I have feelings.”

Some immigrants have not been able to renew their driver’s licenses or obtain work authorizations because they cannot get the proper paperwork in time to prove they are here legally, according to immigration attorneys and advocacy groups.

“I get cases where people can’t drive their children to school because they don’t have a driver’s license,” Abu-Hannoud said.

Some people who have lost licenses or work permits were afraid to talk to the Tribune for this report. They feared speaking out against the government could harm their chances at getting green cards.

But now, those frustrated people are finding another way to express themselves: They’re suing the government.

Around 2005, the FBI started to see an increase in the number of mandamus lawsuits, which aim to force the government to perform a job it has failed or neglected to do.

Before 2005, the FBI said it was rarely the subject of such a suit. But in the last two years, it’s been named in 5,000 cases, many of them related to name checks.

“I never used to do them (mandamus suits),” said Eric Bjotvedt, a Phoenix-based immigration attorney. “Now, it’s routine. Once a day, someone is calling about them.”

For a while, some lawsuits appeared to be working. The government would expedite the applications and name checks before the case could be argued before a judge. But in February, USCIS changed its policy and stopped asking the FBI to expedite a name check just because someone filed a lawsuit.

Now the government is fighting back, and people such as Khan, who was contemplating legal action, are thinking twice before hiring a lawyer to fight the system.

An amendment was added to a U.S. Senate immigrationreform plan that would have required the FBI to complete name checks within 180 days. But the reform package was shelved Thursday, and its future is murky. Asad Khan said he can understand why millions of illegal immigrants come here each year. He said they are desperately trying to feed their families and to find a better life. He can’t help feeling frustrated that they could be granted legal status in the U.S. when they have not followed all the rules.

“There are people like me who have been living here and paying huge amounts of taxes,” he said.

He wants to see immigration reform that can help make the process smoother. He recently sent a letter to Sen. Jon Kyl explaining his plight. “I want to show who I am and the type of people this is impacting,” he said. “This is my way of marching.”