Improprieties Alleged in INS’ Citizenship Process

A U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service clerk in Los Angeles said Wednesday that she believes the fingerprint cards of between 4,000 and 6,000 citizenship applicants were tossed in the garbage last month before the prints were ever forwarded to the FBI for legally mandated background checks.

“They were put in the trash,” Kathy Bell, an office automation clerk, said in an interview.

Bell, 41, who joined the INS in 1993 and worked on processing the fingerprints, called the disappearance of the records part of a pattern of expediting citizenship applications mandated by INS management. She described crates of fingerprint cards sitting in INS offices, apparently ignored for months.

Top INS officials in Los Angeles immediately denied the charges and defended a citizenship process that is increasingly under attack on Capitol Hill.

“We’re not sure what in the heck she’s talking about,” said Rosemary Melville, deputy district director in Los Angeles. “I would characterize the citizenship process as having a great deal of integrity.”

The FBI checks for criminal background are required by law. Certain convicted criminals are barred from becoming U.S. citizens.

The Los Angeles district generates more than one-quarter of all citizenship applications nationwide.

An unprecedented naturalization rush--prompted in part by Proposition 187 in California and congressional measures targeting benefits for noncitizens--will result in the swearing-in of a record 1.1 million new citizens in 1996, the INS says.

Bell has already made her allegations known to a congressional subcommittee that is investigating alleged improprieties in the citizenship program. She said local INS personnel seemed uninterested when she raised her concerns to them, so she decided to tell Congress and the press.

But Melville said no one at the INS ever recalled Bell raising such concerns.

“It’s just appalling to me that an employee that had access to me . . . and everyone else would just make an accusation like this,” Melville said. “Why wouldn’t she have raised this in meetings?”

Bell’s allegations are the latest to surface regarding the naturalization program, which has become a contentious political issue in this election year.

U.S. Rep. Bill Zeliff (R-New Hampshire), who heads a House subcommittee that has been investigating citizenship efforts, called the allegations from Bell and other INS workers in Los Angeles who have come forward “highly credible,” and said his panel would look at the charges closely.

Bell is among the first persons inside the naturalization program in Los Angeles to speak publicly about what she calls improprieties. She was accompanied during the interview Wednesday by James Humble-Sanchez, an INS special agent in Los Angeles who is a former president of the local representing INS employees here. Humble-Sanchez does not work with citizenship issues.

The most serious issue she raised was a charge that five crates containing between 4,000 and 6,000 fingerprint cards from citizenship applicants were destroyed last month. The cards had yet to be sent to the FBI, Bell said.

She said she saw janitors carry the crates out of an INS office but does not know first-hand what happened after that. But she believes the records were destroyed.

According to Bell, the prints belonged to people who completed the naturalization process without having the prints checked by the FBI.

She quoted the top INS official in Los Angeles, Donald Neufeld, as saying of the boxes, “Let’s get rid of them. Let’s not have them sitting here. We don’t want anybody seeing them.”

Neufeld was on jury duty Tuesday and could not be reached for comment. But Melville, the INS deputy director in Los Angeles, denied that Neufeld or any other INS official gave orders to destroy boxes of fingerprints that had yet to be forward to the FBI.

“There’s absolutely no way he made that order,” Melville said.

One possibility, Melville said, is that the boxes of fingerprints had been shifted to another INS office for processing. Another possibility, Melville said, is that the prints had been returned by the FBI as unreadable or otherwise faulty, and the applicants had to submit new fingerprints.

Since the summer, Republicans have charged that the Clinton Administration has put citizenship applications on the fast track--cutting corners and closing eyes to violations of procedures--on the assumption that most new citizens will sign up as Democrats.

“We now have good reason to suspect the INS has given citizenship to tens of thousands of dangerous criminals over the past year in an obvious effort to register hundreds of thousands of new Democratic voters,” Zeliff said. “They are misusing the citizenship process for political purposes, which is not only unethical but illegal.”

The administration denies overlooking safeguards in its “Citizenship U.S.A.” effort, which kicked off last year and has been a huge success in signing up new citizens.

At a recent House session, Humble-Sanchez testified that thousands of newly sworn-in citizens concealed past criminal records that may have disqualified some of them from citizenship.

In those cases, Humble-Sanchez said, the mandated FBI fingerprint checks arrived back at the INS after the people were already naturalized.

INS officials disputed Humble-Sanchez’s account and contended that only a tiny minority of recently sworn-in citizens--only 69 of 60,000 who took the oath in August in Los Angeles--may have committed crimes serious enough to disqualify them from U.S. citizenship.

The INS is taking steps to revoke the citizenship of anyone naturalized improperly, said Richard K. Rogers, INS district director in Los Angeles.

Under Citizenship U.S.A, officials acknowledge that procedures were streamlined, use of computers was increased and staffs were doubled and sometimes tripled to help cut delays in processing citizenship applications that in some cases had ballooned to 18 months or more. Those delays had resulted in strong criticism of the INS and the Clinton Administration, especially from Latino and other ethnic activists.

Immigrant activists have since credited the administration with reducing red tape and cutting down delays to six months or so. These activists say Republicans are now wrongly trying to discredit the process.

“I think conservative factions in the Republican Party clearly see this increase in citizenship as not in their self-interest,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a Latino think tank that has studied citizenship issues.