Various factors account for the decrease in naturalizations and lengthier delays. One reason is that the immigration service’s already-limited resources are regularly diverted away from applications processing to deal with the “crisis of the moment.” In 2003, for example, backlogs grew worse because adjudications officers were pulled away from their normal casework in order to carry out the Special Registration program, which required immigration staff to fingerprint, photograph, and interrogate more than 83,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants across the nation. Special Registration was a monumental failure in improving national security – not a single terrorist was uncovered through it – but it succeeded in clogging up operations in the New York District Office and other large immigration offices around the country for many months, adding to the pile of naturalization cases that still have not been processed.
A shortage of staff and resources to handle the proliferation of new security checks has also caused increasing delays in naturalization processing. Local districts have to run multiple layers of security checks on every application but have not been given sufficient staffing or infrastructural support necessary to handle this efficiently. Every naturalization applicant is now subjected to at least three kinds of security checks: (1) Interagency Border Information System (IBIS) database checks; (2) FBI fingerprint checks, valid for 15 months; and (3) FBI namechecks. Regarding the latter, immigration officials report that it is taking an extremely long time to receive a response from FBI and that this is dragging out the processing times for every type of application. Unfortunately, unfunded mandates issued by agency heads in Washington, D.C. with little concern for local district office capacity put adjudications staff at these local offices in an impossible situation.
A shortage of staff and resources to handle the proliferation of new security checks has also caused increasing delays in naturalization processing. Local districts have to run multiple layers of security checks on every application but have not been given sufficient staffing or infrastructural support necessary to handle this efficiently. Every naturalization applicant is now subjected to at least three kinds of security checks: (1) Interagency Border Information System (IBIS) database checks; (2) FBI fingerprint checks, valid for 15 months; and (3) FBI namechecks. Regarding the latter, immigration officials report that it is taking an extremely long time to receive a response from FBI and that this is dragging out the processing times for every type of application. Unfortunately, unfunded mandates issued by agency heads in Washington, D.C. with little concern for local district office capacity put adjudications staff at these local offices in an impossible situation.