Battling to Save Their Citizenship

A La Puente mother fails to disclose an arrest arising from an incident in which she says police mistook a common ornamental plant found at her home for marijuana.

An Oregon house painter omits mention of two traffic-related arrests.

A Microsoft software engineer allegedly says she was living in Utah when she was actually residing in Washington state.

The supposed transgressions may appear minor, but the consequences are not. The three are among more than 5,500 immigrants nationwide who could face loss of U.S. citizenship for allegedly lying about or not informing the Immigration and Naturalization Service of such past incidents.

The three filed suit against the federal government last week as part of a nationwide class action challenging the constitutionality of a new INS procedure that greatly speeds the process for revoking citizenship. At the same time, all three are in INS proceedings contesting the agency’s actions.

A small percentage of those at risk are clearly convicted criminals who should never have been granted citizenship, authorities say. Of the 6,361 suspect cases originally identified by INS auditors, 361 people were found to have been convicted of felonies and other crimes that would have made them ineligible for citizenship--and possibly subject them to deportation. About 677 suspected violators have been cleared.

The vast majority of the cases involve applicants who allegedly did not inform the INS of past arrests. Such omissions are considered perjury and may bar offenders from becoming citizens--even if the applicants were never convicted of any crime stemming from the arrests.

“If they can take my citizenship so easily, what rights will I have?” asked Irina Gorbach, the software engineer and former Soviet refugee who denies making any misstatement to the INS about where she was living. “I thought that because this was a democracy, things would be better here.”

Gorbach was sworn in as a citizen in January, almost six years after her arrival in the United States. She said she moved from Salt Lake City to Washington while her application was pending and informed the INS of the move.

“I am insulted that they have accused me of lying,” she said.

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If Gorbach and the others lose their cases, they will not necessarily be deported. However, even a return to legal resident noncitizen status does involve loss of rights, including the right to vote, hold certain government jobs and receive many public benefits.

The suit, alleging that the new INS procedure violates 5th Amendment due process rights, attacks perhaps the largest citizenship-revocation campaign ever undertaken in the United States.

Representatives of the INS and U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, also named as a defendant, declined comment on the suit, which has 10 named plaintiffs, from New York to California. The officials also declined to discuss details of any individual’s citizenship application.

Still, the federal authorities vigorously defend the expedited citizenship-stripping efforts.

“This process is not being rammed through,” said Andrew Lluberes, an INS spokesman in Washington. “Taking away citizenship is a very serious matter, and it is not being done lightly.”

Agueda Escalante, a 38-year-old homemaker from La Puente, said she never even considered her bizarre 1993 encounter with police in Panorama City an arrest. She said four officers came to her apartment one day, explaining that they were responding to a 911 call. Finding no emergency, the police looked around her home.

“You have marijuana plants,” one of the officers told her, according to Escalante, a native of Baja California who came to the United States as a teenager with her mother.

Stunned, she protested that the potted herb was a common house plant, Escalante recalled. To no avail. She was handcuffed and taken to the police station. Once the mistake was discovered, Escalante said, she was released. Court records show that there was never a formal charge against her. And she said she never did get her plant back.

“It was a nightmare, but I tried never to think about it again,” recalled Escalante, who said she has never used drugs. “To me, they made a mistake, and that was it.”

She finally became a U.S. citizen in 1995, 22 years after she arrived in the United States. “It was a great feeling,” said Escalante, who voted for the first time in 1996 and is now the mother of a 3-year-old U.S.-born girl. “I felt like I was part of the United States.”

During her citizenship interview, Escalante said, she was not asked if she had ever been arrested--a question that INS examiners are supposed to pose. And she did not think to volunteer the information, she said.

In November, her new life as a U.S. citizen came crashing down. The INS notified Escalante that her citizenship was being revoked because she engaged in “willful misrepresentation or concealment of material fact,” citing her 1993 arrest “for unlawfully cultivating marijuana plants.”

The formal INS notice to Escalante added: “You were not a person of good moral character when you took the oath of allegiance.”

Escalante said she was devastated. “It was terrible,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, where to go. . . . I was even too embarrassed to tell my mom.”

The new citizens who have come forward to complain provide the first detailed look at the human consequences of a story that has been presented largely as a political controversy: An alleged Clinton administration effort to hasten sign-ups during its 1995-96 Citizenship USA initiative prompted Republican charges that the program was a partisan Democratic effort to boost voter rolls and that it resulted in thousands of convicted criminals wrongly becoming citizens.

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Since late 1996, the INS has been empowered on its own to void grants of naturalization that officials discover were approved by mistake or through fraud. Previously, federal judges heard all citizenship-revocation cases, which authorities say usually totaled no more than a handful a year, typically involving accused Nazi war criminals.

Government officials stress that anyone facing loss of citizenship will have multiple chances to present his or her viewpoint, first before INS examiners, then in potential appeals to a senior agency panel, finally in federal courts.

Advocates of the ongoing “de-naturalization” campaign argue that lying under oath--as most targeted are accused of doing--should rightfully disqualify applicants from sharing in the privileges of citizenship.

“Honesty on the basic application form is crucial,” said Allen Kay, spokesman for Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House immigration subcommittee and author of a pending bill that would give the INS even broader citizenship-stripping latitude.

But those targeted and their legal representatives call the effort a case of law enforcement run amok.

“The threat of de-naturalization is the ultimate form of immigrant bashing,” said Meredith Brown, a lawyer with One Stop Immigration & Education Center, an East L.A. agency that represents 21 people facing loss of citizenship. “There’s a political backdrop to this.”

The White House denied any Tammany Hall-like scheme to coax new immigrants to the polls regardless of their criminal pasts. But internal audits showed gaping security lapses in the citizenship process, prompting an unprecedented review of the records of more than 1 million new citizens sworn in during 1995-96, a period of record naturalizations. Investigators examined each successful applicant for criminal pasts, cross-checking against FBI databases.

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In all, the auditors identified 6,361 people who may have been improperly naturalized. INS officials are now reviewing those cases to see how many will face loss of citizenship. According to the latest numbers, the government has formally moved to strip the citizenship of 1,481.

One of those under investigation is Javier Sanguino, a 36-year-old Oregon house painter who came to the United States in 1980 from Mexico. He got his green card in 1988 through the amnesty program and gained U.S. citizenship in January 1996.

“When I finally became a citizen, it was one of the proudest moments of my life,” he said in a sworn statement. “I felt like a new person. Suddenly, I would have lots of new opportunities in life. I was very happy.”

It wouldn’t last for long. In August 1997, the INS moved to take Sanguino’s citizenship away. The problem: He failed to mention two arrests during his naturalization interview. But Sanguino said he thought both were traffic violations--one for bumping into a parked car, which led to a conviction, and the other for driving under the influence, which was dismissed, according to court records. Traffic offenses are specifically excluded from the questions on the naturalization application.

Moreover, Sanguino argues that he had previously informed the INS of both incidents as part of his successful amnesty application.

Today, he is worried about his possible loss of citizenship and how it may affect him and his wife, Elizabeth, who obtained her U.S. residency based on his citizenship. He fears she may be deported.

“I think about this problem all of the time,” Sanguino said. “And sometimes I can’t sleep at night, because I don’t know what is in the future for me and Elizabeth.”