www.csua.org/u/k27 -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/21/AR2007112102419.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR
Department of Homeland Security failed to prepare for a massive influx of applications for US citizenship and other immigration benefits this summer, prompting complaints from Hispanic leaders and voter-mobilization groups that several hundred thousand people likely will not be granted citizenship in time to cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election. Bush administration officials said yesterday that they had anticipated applicants would rush to file their paperwork to beat a widely publicized fee increase that took effect July 30, but did not expect the scale of the response. The backlog comes just months after US officials failed to prepare for tougher border security requirements that triggered months-long delays for millions of Americans seeking passports.
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US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS. Such a timeline would push many prospective citizens well past voter-registration deadlines for the 2008 primaries and the general elections.
might stimulate demand from some folks to file who wouldn't have otherwise, and some from folks to file earlier than they would have," said Michael Aytes, associate director of USCIS, "but we never anticipated" the extent of the growth. Other factors include legal immigrants' anxiety at an increasingly harsh tenor of the political debate over illegal immigration, and heightened interest in the 2008 presidential election, officials said. The immigration agency's workload has nearly doubled, Aytes said, with 14 million naturalization applications arriving from October 2006 to September 2007, compared with 731,000 applications the year before. Between July and September of this year alone, USCIS received 560,000 applications, he said. The number of green-card-related applications surged to 876,000 in fiscal 2007, from 497,000 in fiscal 2006, he said. At one point this summer, USCIS had 1 million applications and checks waiting to be opened and acknowledged, Aytes said, a backlog that now stands at 235,000. Overall, USCIS received 77 million applications for all types of immigration benefits, up from 63 million.
"I really want to get as many people out there to vote as possible." "We are going to process these cases as responsibly and as quickly as we can, but we're not focused on any of the election cycle," Aytes said. USCIS spokesman Bill Wright emphasized that political calculations played no role in agency decisions.
Processing times for passport applications ballooned from three weeks to three or four months, jeopardizing summer travel plans for millions of Americans. Wait times returned to normal after the State Department allocated more resources and staffing. The new crunch -- which some USCIS officials have dubbed a "frontlog" -- threatens to create a political headache that also stems in part from a State-DHS miscommunication. In addition to raising immigration fees this summer, the Bush administration triggered another cascade of applications for legal permanent residency, or green cards, from skilled immigrant workers when it pushed back a planned July 2 deadline, largely because the two departments failed to coordinate on how many slots were available. "It is the same pattern," said Crystal Williams, deputy director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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