Immigrants Eager to Vote Sue to Hasten Citizenship

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Immigrants Eager to Vote Sue to Hasten Citizenship

By KIRK SEMPLE

Published: July 16, 2008

Lawyers representing a Latino advocacy group told a federal judge on Tuesday that tens of thousands of people in and around New York City, most of them Latino, were at risk of being disenfranchised in the November elections because the federal government was taking so long to process their citizenship applications.

The lawyers asked the judge to compel federal immigration authorities to speed up the process to ensure that eligible applicants receive their citizenship before Oct. 10, the deadline in New York for registering to vote in November’s general election.

At stake are the applications of at least 55,000 people in the New York City area who have been waiting at least six months — and as long as four years — for their documents to be processed, the lawyers said.

“It is time for their wait to come to an end,” said Malick Ghachem, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in early March by the nonprofit advocacy group, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

But a lawyer for the federal government argued that the agencies responsible for processing the citizenship applications were operating within the law and had speeded up the review process across the United States.

“Congress is well aware that current processing times are lengthy,” said Robert Yalen, an assistant United States attorney.

Judge Lawrence M. McKenna of Federal District Court said that he was mindful of the time-sensitivity of the lawsuit and intended to rule on the matter within the next several days.

The federal government has been contending with a huge backlog of citizenship applications, especially since last summer, when the announcement of an imminent fee increase prompted a wave of more than three million immigration applications of all types. In the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 20, the agency received about 1.4 million citizenship applications, nearly double the number in the previous fiscal year.

The delays have spurred thousands of lawsuits around the country, mostly by applicants who had applied and been interviewed by immigration officials but had waited more than 120 days since they took a required civics examination administered by an immigration officer. By law, the government is required to decide on naturalization petitions within 120 days after a candidate passes that test.

Officials from the organization have underscored the urgency of their lawsuit because of the approaching deadline for voter registration in New York. The organization has been one of many Latino organizations around the country that have campaigned aggressively for Latino immigrants to seek citizenship so they can vote in the fall election.

The lawyers representing the six named plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit argued that a criminal background check by the F.B.I. that was added to the process in 2002 was the main reason for the backlog, and that it only duplicated other mandated background checks.

In addition, they said that a Congressional resolution in 2000 called for all citizenship applications to be completed within 180 days of initial filing, though the lawyers acknowledged that the resolution was not binding.

Mr. Yalen, the assistant United States attorney, said that the individual cases of the six named plaintiffs in the lawsuit had mostly been resolved. According to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, five of the plaintiffs have already received their citizenship, and one is scheduled to take her exam.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/nyregion...amp;oref=slogin