Fingerprint Data Expire as INS Lags

As many as 200,000 citizenship applicants in the Los Angeles area--the great majority with no history of criminal behavior--will have to submit new fingerprints because of bureaucratic delays in checking their old prints for criminal records, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner said Thursday.

Many have been in line for two years or more, representing almost half of a backlog that Meissner called a “black hole” and pledged to scale down.

All 150,000 to 200,000 people affected are running up against an INS policy that fingerprint checks expire after 15 months and must be retaken to ensure that applicants have not committed new crimes. The INS was unable to extend the period to 24 months, as she had hoped, Meissner said.

“Everyone is frustrated,” the nation’s top immigration official said at a USC immigration conference sponsored by the Community Newspaper Council, a group of ethnic-oriented publications. “If I could change anything with a magic wand right now, it would be to be timely on our naturalization applications.”

The agency’s stated goal is to cut the citizenship application process to six months. That’s about what the waiting period was in late 1996, before a scandal involving naturalization of criminals spurred an overhaul and slowed the process.

Meissner said her agency also hopes to more than double the citizenship fee--to $225--by Oct. 1 to help hire more staff and to buy more computers and other equipment to handle the record number of pending applications. The proposed fee hike, from the current $95, had already been made public, but the Oct. 1 date is sooner than expected.

Immigrant advocates voiced fears that requiring new checks of those already fingerprinted would increase delays in a system so overloaded it virtually ground to a halt last year in Southern California, which generates about one-quarter of the nation’s naturalization applications.

Since the INS took over the fingerprinting task late last year at the direction of Congress, it has opened fewer than a dozen fingerprint centers in the Los Angeles area.

Under the previous system, more than 300 private facilities handled fingerprinting for immigrants.

“How do we know these people will even be able to get their fingerprints retaken?” asked Alicia Lepe, board member of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Others assailed the INS for not adequately publicizing the addresses and telephone numbers of the authorized fingerprint centers. In addition, applicants are barred from going to the centers without an appointment or a direct referral from the INS, which fears overwhelming the facilities’ capacities.

“As a practical matter in Los Angeles, citizenship applicants can’t even get their fingerprints taken,” said Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza. “We’re absolutely going to see more delays.”

Fingerprint checks are a key element of the background checks that are central to the revamped citizenship process. The prints are sent to the FBI to determine if applicants may be ineligible for U.S. citizenship because of past offenses.

“This has been emotionally very taxing for us,” said Dron Battan, 42, of Downey, a naturalized U.S. citizen whose wife, Raveetha Battan, is a Fijian national. She has been in line more than 18 months and has had her fingerprints taken twice. “I think this is bureaucratic incompetence.”

The delays began to mount with congressional allegations in 1996 that thousands of convicted criminals had wrongly become citizens.

As congressionally mandated reforms were being implemented, the process slowed. The number of new citizens sworn in nationwide plummeted by almost 50% in fiscal 1997, to 569,822--down from a record 1.1 million the previous year.

Yet an unprecedented 1.7 million people applied for citizenship last year, quadrupling the number of applicants just five years earlier. Officials say applications have slowed somewhat this year, in part because of the delays.

Many old applications have gathered dust in INS storage facilities. Only two weeks ago, the INS here finally collected 150,000 citizenship files in a sixth-floor room in the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles and began poring through them.

“A quagmire” is what the district’s top citizenship official, Wade Prater, called the bulging rows of manila files, stacked on metal file cases and in plastic crates, as he spoke with reporters Thursday.

Meissner pledged that the new round of “re-fingerprinting” would proceed smoothly. She said that more than four times as many citizenship applicants were processed in March as in December. Officers are now interviewing nearly 1,000 citizenship seekers a day, three times the number six months ago. Moreover, the commissioner added, the FBI is much less likely to reject fingerprints now because of smudges, incomplete data or other problems.

Meissner said those who must have their prints taken anew began receiving notices this week to come to INS centers. They will not be charged for the fingerprint service. A similar process will be introduced nationwide, the commissioner said, but Los Angeles was chosen first because the problem is gravest here.

In addition, Meissner said, the INS will continue to increase staff handling citizenship cases, will add $600,000 in overtime pay and other backlog expenses in Los Angeles, and take other steps to move the stalled caseload.

“This backlog reduction is going forward,” Meissner declared.

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Where to Turn for Information

Citizenship applicants who want to learn about the status of their pending applications may write to the U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Box 532469, Los Angeles 90053-2469.

Those seeking information should include their full names, addresses, dates of birth, dates interviewed and alien registration numbers.