Waiting to become a citizen

BOISE – For six years, Ali Al-Lati has worked with the military, teaching soldiers simple Iraqi words and commands, telling them about the cultural mores of his native land and offering advice on how to deal with the extreme weather they’ll face in Iraq.

He’s a frequent visitor at the U.S. Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., and has passed the background checks necessary to work for the Department of Defense contractor SMI Global Mission Support.

But to the FBI, the Iraqi refugee living in Boise is just one of millions waiting years for his name to be cleared, a necessary step for U.S. citizenship.

Now, he’s turning to the federal courts for help. He’s one of dozens around the United States suing the government because the FBI has yet to complete a process called a name check.

“I came to this country because I want to live here. I work hard here. I love this country,” said Al-Lati, who’s learned English and passed the prerequisite citizenship test. He’s even passed a background check by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I’ve waited until now, when I am 35 years old. Am I going to have to wait for citizenship when I am 60 years old? I went to the courts because this is the only way to do it.”

Both the FBI and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledge the delays are a problem. About 150,000 citizenship applications nationwide have a wait time longer than six months, said Maria Elena Upson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Citizenship Immigration Service in Dallas.

“It’s unacceptable, frankly, to have to wait this long. The agency understands that,” said Upson, who added the agency is trying to find ways to expedite the process. “But you have to understand that USCIS receives millions of applications a year. One percent gets hung up on additional name checks.”

The FBI completes about 62,000 name checks every week, said Trent Pedersen, a spokesman with the bureau’s Salt Lake City office, with close to 27,000 new requests coming from USCIS alone on a weekly basis.

The initial name checks are done electronically – names are entered into a database to see if the FBI has gathered any information on them in the past.

But even information on similar names yields results, or “hits,” and each hit has to be investigated so that information can be forwarded to USCIS. Not all the information is stored electronically – there are paper files in many of the bureau’s 265 offices nationwide – and tracking down the reason for each hit can take months, he said.

“Even if only 10 percent of those come back with three or four hits, that’s a huge amount of information to track down,” he said. “There’s a probability that it could be someone who is totally innocent. If it’s a common name, there may be dozens or even hundreds of hits for one name.”

The wait may get worse before it gets better, warns Audrey Singer, an immigration fellow with the Brookings Institute. As lawmakers grapple over the best ways to ensure a secure nation – creating stricter laws on everything from green cards to passports to citizenship applications – agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are bound to get more bogged down, she said.

“I can see future long lines and backlogs if the government doesn’t prepare properly for these changes,” she said.

Lawsuits are becoming more common, and would-be citizens in several states including Utah, California, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Idaho have sued in the hope of speeding up the process.

Al-Lati filed his lawsuit in May after waiting nearly five years for his name check to be completed. He and his attorney maintain Al-Lati has a clean record. He keeps a handful of certificates of commendation from various military groups thanking him for his service as proof.

“We don’t know why it’s taking so long,” he said. “I asked, ‘Did I do something wrong to make you hold my case?’ They say no. I get depressed every time I am thinking about it.”

Al-Lati frequently stops by the local USCIS office to check on his application status. He hopes that once he becomes a citizen he can find work on a U.S. military base in Iraq, interpreting for the government and serving his new country.

He came to the United States as a refugee about seven years ago.

In Iraq, Al-Lati said, he risked execution when, at the age of 18, he refused to join Saddam Hussein’s army and invade Kuwait. Within months he was captured by the Republican Guard, shot in the leg during his arrest. But the judge on his case was lenient, sentencing him to ten years in prison instead of death.

Six months after his incarceration, the first Gulf War began, and coalition forces bombed the military base that contained Al-Lati’s prison.

In the chaos, a guard took pity on the prisoners, unlocking the prison doors and telling them to run. Al-Lati fled home to Al-Samwa to a surprised mother who had believed he was dead. After taking part in an unsuccessful uprising against Hussein, Al-Lati ended up in an American refugee camp where he lived for six years before coming to the United States.

His friend, Ahmed Al-Fahdi, has a similar story, having fled to the refugee camps after his brother was executed for trying to attend school instead of joining the army.

Now living in Boise, Al-Fahdi has also sued over his several-year wait for an FBI name check. And now he is hoping more urgently than ever for a resolution: His wife, still in Iraq, is expecting their first child in two months.

Al-Fahdi is able to visit her in Iraq, when money permits. But he’s eager to bring her to the United States, once his citizenship application is granted.

“I’ve applied for her to get the green card, but it takes a long time,” Al-Fahdi said. “She is crying all the time. She wants me there when she has the baby, but I don’t know because I’m waiting for the lawyer and maybe I’m going to get my citizenship first.”