Suit Seeks to Speed Citizenship Process

Lawyers for thousands of south Florida residents asked a federal court to compel the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to speed up the citizenship process. “The dream of becoming a U.S. citizen has become a nightmare,” attorney Cheryl Little said after filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of clients, many of them elderly and disabled, who have been waiting as long as two years to be sworn in as Americans. Although the INS in Miami is indeed swamped, no region of the country has more pending citizenship cases than Los Angeles, where an estimated 400,000 immigrants await INS decisions or naturalization dates. The suit asks the federal district court in Miami to order the INS to swear in new citizens within 20 days of application approval.