LOS ANGELES — After working through the Las Vegas summer lugging boxes and heavy furniture to raise money to apply for U.S. citizenship, Jose Silva plunked down the $725 fee in the fall of 2017, just days after he turned 18. “I hoped to vote in the midterm elections,” he said.
But it took until last week, more than a year and a half after he applied, for the college student to be scheduled for a citizenship interview, which he will have March 20. If approved, Silva will take the oath later this year.
The time that aspiring Americans must wait to be naturalized is now almost twice as long, 10 months, as it was two years ago. In Las Vegas, where the office has a particularly large backlog, applicants could wait 31 months.
The delays come as the Trump administration tightens scrutiny of applications, diverts staff from reviewing them and introduces proposals likely to make it more difficult, and cumbersome, for green-card holders to qualify and complete the process.
Nearly 9 million immigrants are eligible for citizenship. The steep application fee and the civics and English tests have historically deterred many from seeking naturalization. Instead, they have renewed their legal residence every decade.
But the administration’s move to tighten restrictions on immigration has awakened many longtime permanent residents to the fact that a green card does not shield them from deportation. It has also compelled many to seek citizenship in order to cast a ballot, with hundreds of thousands of immigrants poised to become potential voters before the 2020 election.
After supporting legislation that would cut overall immigration, President Donald Trump recently championed the economic benefits of attracting foreign talent. In his State of the Union address, the president said he wanted “people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”
Yet the lengthening backlog in applications is making it more difficult for immigrants to become civically engaged and to solidify ties to their adopted country, critics of the administration’s policies say.
“Far from the public eye, the Trump administration is strangling the naturalization process,” said Steven Choi, a chair of the National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of advocacy groups pushing to offer naturalization workshops and legal services to would-be citizens.
Coalition members filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles in September against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that reviews the applications, challenging the processing delays.
The agency has blamed the delays on a sharp rise in applications.
“USCIS continues to adjudicate the pending naturalization caseload, which skyrocketed under the Obama administration, more than doubling from 291,800 in September 2010 to nearly 700,000 by the beginning of 2017. Now, despite a record and unprecedented application surge workload, USCIS is completing more citizenship applications, more efficiently and effectively — outperforming itself,” Michael Bars, an agency spokesman, said in response to emailed questions.
There have been bigger application spikes in the past, such as in 2007, when the caseload swelled to 1.4 million and the agency was able to work through the backlog by the following year. That has not happened with the current pileup.
A total of 750,793 applications were pending at the end of June, the latest period for which figures were available. But the rate at which they are being processed is at the lowest in a decade, according to an analysis released this month by Boundless Immigration, a technology company in Seattle that helps immigrants obtain green cards and citizenship. The agency was able to work through only about half its applications in 2017, compared with about 60 percent in 2016. (Data for 2018 was not available.)
“Applications for citizenship have surged many times in the past and USCIS was able to bring enough resources to bear to tame them. Wait times have doubled, and the agency is barely processing half of their backlog,” said Doug Rand, the founder of Boundless Immigration.
A Feb. 12 letter to the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services that was signed by 86 members of Congress raised concerns about the “alarming growth in processing delays” for naturalization and other services like green cards and visas.
It noted that the agency’s proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year included a request that more than $200 million of its fee revenue be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that rounds up people for deportation.
“This appears to represent part of USCIS’s larger shift toward prioritizing immigration enforcement over the service-oriented adjudications at the core of the agency’s mandate,” said the letter, which sought details about efforts to reduce and eliminate backlogs.
Processing times vary across the country, depending on caseloads and staffing at regional offices. Applicants in Houston could wait almost two years; in Atlanta, the wait could be even longer. In contrast, those seeking citizenship in Louisville, Kentucky, have been completing the process in up to 10 months. In Buffalo, New York, the wait is just over a year.
Citizenship applications are receiving additional scrutiny — and that is likely to intensify. The Trump administration says that it is placing a premium on integrity. But immigration lawyers and other experts report that officers are digging up information going back years to raise questions that are delaying, and jeopardizing, citizenship for many applicants.
“The Trump administration has infused the entire legal immigration system with skepticism, but naturalization should be different: These people are already here legally; they want to be citizens to better assimilate,” said Rand, who served in the Obama administration.
The government has also been taking a harder look at some immigrants who have already become citizens. Last year, the agency launched a denaturalization task force with the aim of stripping citizenship from people found to have committed fraud to obtain it.
Some applicants have shown up for their interview only to learn they could be deported.
“This past year, for the first time we have started to see people who apply for naturalization not only have it denied but also be placed in removal proceedings to take away their permanent residence,” said Ted Farrell, an immigration lawyer in Louisville.
Ahmed Bafagih, 31, a permanent resident since 2010, was denied citizenship after he told an officer during his interview last month in Houston that he was born in Kenya, not Yemen, as appeared in his file. He is appealing the decision.
“Acting in good faith, I tried to correct the error that would have gone unnoticed,” said the lab technician, who moved to Sanaa from Mombasa, his birthplace, when he was about 30 days old.
The denial, reviewed by The New York Times, stated that, “Your record reflects that there was fraud in procurement of your Legal Permanent Resident status,” referring to the erroneous birth certificate.
Bafagih’s Yemeni-born parents and three sisters are U.S. citizens.
His father, Jamal Bafagih, who won awards during 25 years of service with U.S. government missions in the Middle East, including with the Pentagon and the Commerce Department, said: “I raised my kids to love this country. Suddenly when my son reports an error, it bounces back to hurt him; that leaves a very bad taste.”
Slated for implementation are a series of regulatory changes that are likely to make the process even more onerous.
One proposal would require many citizenship applicants to produce a decade of international travel history, rather than the current five; more documentation, like children’s birth certificates, which many refugees lack; as well as more information to ascertain “good moral character.”
The agency has also proposed narrowing the eligibility criteria for a waiver of the full $725 filing fee, which would reduce the number of low-income immigrants who could afford to naturalize.
Meanwhile, many agency officers who conduct citizenship interviews have been reassigned to the southern border to interview asylum-seekers, whose cases the administration wishes to expedite, according to an agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media.
For many of those waiting their turn, more is at stake than the simple pride of citizenship. Holding a U.S. passport opens access to certain jobs, such as in law-enforcement agencies, and scholarships that are not available to noncitizens. Silva, the applicant in Las Vegas, is studying Arabic, a language in high demand by government agencies, which often only hire citizens.
He’s studying at a community college but hopes to transfer to a four-year university next year — and that’s another issue.
“My passion is languages,” said Silva, “and for scholarships I have found, you have to be a U.S. citizen.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.