How Some Criminals Gained Citizenship

WASHINGTON —  When Joel Lopez Jauregui of Woodland Hills was sworn in as a U.S. citizen, court records show he was on probation for a 1994 conviction for drunk driving and carrying a concealed weapon.

Immigrants with such criminal records as Jauregui’s are normally deemed ineligible for naturalization, according to legal experts. In fact, resident aliens caught carrying concealed weapons are often deported.

But Jauregui, government sources say, was the beneficiary of an embarrassing bureaucratic snafu at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. By its own admission, the agency has conferred citizenship on an undetermined number of immigrants who should have been disqualified because of their criminal histories.

At the same time that Jauregui was naturalized, according to confidential INS records obtained by The Times, the agency also granted citizenship to Wichen Srichongsirikull, a 40-year-old Garden Grove man of Chinese descent who was convicted twice of spousal abuse in 1992 and 1993, and Micahel Dingva Galabe, 33, of Valencia, a Cameroon native with a history of drunk-driving charges.

The criminal histories of these men were provided to the INS by the FBI, which used fingerprints submitted with the applications for naturalization.

According to knowledgeable sources inside the INS office in Los Angeles, the three men are representative of many immigrants who were naturalized improperly over the last year because the agency failed to obtain FBI clearance of their records before they were scheduled to appear at naturalization ceremonies.

In Dallas, INS sources said, the list of criminals improperly naturalized includes two convicted child molesters who are now fugitives.

Although the INS system for checking criminal records of immigrants seeking citizenship has been unreliable for many years, officials say, the problem has become more acute in the last year because of an influx of more than 1 million applications under President Clinton’s “Citizenship USA” program. Not until Republicans recently seized on this problem as a campaign issue did INS officials begin to take steps to correct it.

Led by California Gov. Pete Wilson, a number of Republican politicians across the country have demanded that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno disclose the number of criminals naturalized. Joining Wilson’s call Friday were Govs. George W. Bush of Texas, Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, Jim Edgar of Illinois and David Beasley of South Carolina.

Lawyers and agency employees familiar with immigration law and INS procedures said Jauregui, Srichongsirikull and Galabe almost certainly would have been denied citizenship if the INS had obtained their criminal records before scheduling them for naturalization.

“This is outrageous,” said Rosemary Jenks, a policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan research group. “There is nothing the United States has to offer that is more valuable than citizenship, and we are callously giving it to criminals. We have enough criminals who are native-born; we don’t need to be importing them.”

Jauregui, Srichongsirikull and Galabe could not be reached for comment. Eric Andrus, a spokesman for the INS, declined to comment on the cases, emphasizing that the identities of naturalized citizens are not public record.

Exactly how many new U.S. citizens have criminal records similar to these three men is the subject of a hot dispute.

Of 1.2 million immigrants naturalized over the last year, Wilson and other Republicans charge, as many as 100,000 had criminal records that should have disqualified them. INS officials say the number does not exceed a few hundred.

Not until Friday did the FBI agree to comply with a long-standing request from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to supply congressional investigators with the criminal records of any newly naturalized citizens. Fifty-two boxes of criminal records are to be delivered to the committee today.

Subcommittee Chairman Bill Zeliff (R-N.H.) insists that the INS is trying to conceal the extent of the problem. “They’ve created a monster here, and they’re making it worse by covering up.”

According to INS sources in Los Angeles, the local office was not aware of the criminal records of Jauregui, Srichongsirikull, Galabe and other immigrants until long after they were approved for naturalization last summer. All three were approved to be naturalized in mass ceremonies at the Los Angeles Convention Center in September.

Under federal law, immigrants are supposed to be automatically rejected for citizenship if they have been convicted of murder, rape, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon or possession of an illegal weapon. They are also supposed to be rejected if they have been convicted of any of a wide variety of lesser crimes in the previous five years.

The report on Jauregui’s criminal history provided to the INS by the FBI shows that he was arrested four times in the last 11 years for a variety of alleged crimes, most recently for beating his wife.

In the most serious of these cases, Jauregui went on trial in Ventura Municipal Court in April 1994, and was convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol and carrying a concealed weapon in his car. The conviction resulted in a $1,480 fine, 60 days in jail and three years of probation.

According to Jenks and several INS employees who declined to be identified, Jauregui’s conviction should have led to his deportation. At a minimum, they said, it should have disqualified him from being naturalized.

Although the INS routinely ships fingerprints of all citizenship applicants to the FBI for clearance, a Justice Department survey of INS regional offices two years ago showed that the process was very poor in some places and barely adequate in others.

“In one district,” the report said, “78% of the alien files reviewed lacked the FBI arrest reports, and there was no evidence that the reports were in the file at the time the applications were granted, denied or withdrawn.”

The INS revamped the system for checking criminal records last summer in an effort to answer these complaints.

But INS officials acknowledge that the new procedures themselves may have been responsible for some criminals being naturalized by mistake.