Issameldin Mohamed, a native of Egypt, explained that he was not entirely sure that suing the US government was a good idea.
"In [Egypt], if you sue the government, there's something wrong here," he said, pointing to his head to indicate how foolhardy it would be.
But Mohamed, 45, of Owings Mills, Maryland, was out of patience, having waited the better part of 10 years to obtain citizenship. Since 2005, he had passed his citizenship test and was waiting only for his name to be cleared in a government background check.
Finally, after filing a lawsuit in October at US District Court in Baltimore that named Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other top government officials as defendants, his naturalization application was approved. On Dec. 14 he became a citizen.
Mohamed and a rising number of immigrants have decided to sue in federal court to force the government to take action on their citizenship applications.
At the US District Court in Alexandria, roughly 100 lawsuits have been filed this year demanding action on stalled citizenship applications. That represents roughly 8 percent of the entire civil docket at the courthouse, which is among the busiest in the nation.
The lawsuits cite federal law requiring agencies to act on a petition within 120 days after it has been reviewed. Rarely do the lawsuits go before a judge, according to a review of court records. Usually, the plaintiff agrees to drop the case after receiving assurances that it will be resolved quickly and favorably.
Morris Days, an attorney with the Maryland-Virginia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has helped Mohamed and 15 others file similar petitions at federal courthouses in the region in recent months.
Days said six already have received citizenship papers or are about to, and he is optimistic that all the applications will be approved.
The holdup invariably is the name check, Days said. Muslims are particularly vulnerable to delays, he said, because names of innocent immigrants get confused with those on terror watch lists.
Delays of two, three or four years are not uncommon, he said.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal agency responsible for processing citizenship applications, has acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of applicants have experienced unacceptable delays because of backlogs in the background checks, which are conducted by the FBI.
Spokesman Chris Bentley said 90 percent of the background checks are completed within six months, but that still leaves a current backlog of 150,000 cases that have been pending six months or longer.
Bentley acknowledged that there has been a big jump nationally in the use of federal lawsuits to prompt action on citizenship applications.
While Bentley said the USCIS had in the past year stopped expediting cases in which lawsuits are filed because of the volume, Days said he was confident that the lawsuits are the only thing that jarred USCIS into action on behalf of his clients.
"If you file the suit and do the right things, they will relent," he said.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS