Weary of Delays, New Arrivals Sue for Citizenship

Delays of two, three or four years are not uncommon, he said.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or 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. An ombudsman for the agency says the numbers are even worse -- that nearly a third of name checks have been pending for more than a year.

At the Alexandria courthouse, most of those who have filed petitions have Muslim or Middle Eastern names, though a few Chinese and Hispanic names are in the mix.

Bentley acknowledged that Arabic names can be cumbersome in terms of completing background checks because of the language differences, confusion over common names and a lack of interpreters.

"All the variations of a name have to be checked," he said. "We empathize with the people whose applications are being delayed, but we are committed to doing the name checks properly."

Mohamed said he never was given an official reason for his delays, but he knows what the problem was.

"I am a Muslim. My name is Mohamed," he said.

For years he watched work colleagues from European countries receive their citizenship papers while his application was lost in the bureaucracy.

"I started to lose hope," he said.

Shazia Naz, 34, of Fairfax, also received her citizenship earlier this month after suing the government in July in federal court in Alexandria. She had passed her citizenship test in February 2006 but never received final approval; immigration officials told her the delay was because of her name and the inability to complete the background check.

She said it would have cost her as much as $5,000 to hire an immigration lawyer, but she filed the suit herself with assistance from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The day she received the call that her application had been approved, she took the citizenship oath at a ceremony in Fairfax.

"I thought that if I didn't go right away, who knows what might happen?" to stall the process again, said Naz, a native of Pakistan.

Bentley acknowledged that there has been a big jump nationally in the use of federal lawsuits to prompt action on citizenship applications. In California, for instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class-action lawsuit complaining that the checks are taking too long.

In the last year, Bentley said, USCIS has stopped expediting cases in which lawsuits are filed because of the volume.

But Days said he is 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.