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Palm Beach Post - May 02, 2008
Eager to vote, Muslims file stack
of lawsuits over citizenship delays
By John Lantigua
STUART — Shadi Odeh has lived 17 of his 31 years in the United States.
He is a Palestinian, transplanted at age 14 to Texas, where he was a boisterous Dallas Cowboys fan. In 1999 he moved to South Florida, where he embraced basketball's Miami Heat, which he watches on a wide-screen TV, eating chicken wings and Italian food. His favorite TV show is The Simpsons.
Odeh says he has become an American in every way but one: He has so far been denied citizenship and the right to vote. He very much wants to vote in November - for a Democrat.
"Barack Obama is a very good candidate, but it is also time to have a woman president," he says. "I would vote for one of those two."
The question is whether he will be able to register. Odeh passed his naturalization exam and citizenship interviews in 2006, but FBI name checks have delayed his swearing-in for more than two years.
Those checks, instituted after the Sept. 11 attacks, involve comparing an applicant's name with names in FBI criminal and intelligence files to see whether the person is a security threat. Even if an applicant's name matches only an acquaintance of a suspect or a witness to an event, approval can be delayed.
Those FBI procedures come on top of security checks performed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which grants or denies citizenship.
The process can take time, too much time for some would-be citizens, especially in an election year.
Odeh is one of six South Florida Muslims who in December sued the federal government, charging that their citizenship applications have been delayed "unreasonably and unlawfully" by name checks. Federal statutes, they insist, require the government to render a decision within 120 days of the interviews.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Osama Qasmieh, a Royal Palm Beach engineer originally from Jordan who has not been outside the U.S. in 20 years. His application has been delayed six years.
They also include another Jordanian, Belle Glade resident Mohammed Abdeen. A relative petitioned 20 years ago for him to be allowed into the U.S., and Abdeen arrived seven years ago. He passed his exam two years ago.
The lawsuit and another brought by five other South Florida Muslims last year are part of an avalanche of suits across the country.
"Hundreds of thousands of people nationally have been delayed," says Tania Galloni, an attorney for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami. "In New York, it's Russians. In California, it's Chinese. In Florida, we have seen a disproportionate number of Muslims affected."
Being denied the right to vote is one way the plaintiffs say they have been damaged.
The delays could affect the November elections, says Altaf Ali, executive director of the South Florida Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He says there are about 200,000 Muslims in Florida, and among those eligible to vote, turnout is traditionally high.
"This year a lot of people in our community are very interested in Barack Obama being the next president," Ali said. "I myself am a Republican, but I won't vote Republican this year." He's backing Obama.
The lawsuits have brought a response from the government. Last month it issued a statement saying extra personnel had been assigned to name checks and backlogged citizenship applications.
"The goal is to complete 98 percent of all name checks within 30 days," the statement said. Citizenship and Immigration Services "and the FBI intend to resolve the remaining 2 percent, which represent the most difficult name checks ... within 90 days or less."
The statement said 29,800 cases that have been pending two years or more would receive priority. Those cases include Odeh, Qasmieh and Abdeen.
The statement also said all cases of people waiting for more than four years had been resolved recently. But Galloni says that is not true of Qasmieh, who has been waiting six years…..
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/05/02/m1a_citizens_0503.html
The Tampa Tribune - April 19, 2008
Lawsuit Loosens Citizenship Backlog
By KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO
TAMPA - Iman Kadom's invitation to her naturalization ceremony landed in her Carrollwood mailbox in early March. Her husband, Akram Jawad, was pleased: "I said, 'Oh, I'm married to an American now.'" They celebrated with cake. Kadom wasn't so festive because her husband's letter hadn't arrived. It still hasn't.
Jawad, a retired Iraqi surgeon-turned-Realtor, has waited almost four years to become a citizen. Like his wife, he is a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit with a dozen other Muslims in the Tampa Bay and Orlando areas to prod the federal government to finalize their citizenship applications. Since its filing in February, three of the plaintiffs' applications have been approved.
The rest are still victims of a backlog that the federal government said this month it's working feverishly to eliminate.
The culprit in the delay, according to the lawsuit: a laborious FBI name-check process that immigration officials intensified in 2002 as an extra security measure beyond the criminal background check. It checks any name match in all FBI case files, whether the name pops up as a subject, associate, conspirator or witness.
Many FBI files are still on paper. So the check often involves hand searching files to see whether the name is indeed a match with the would-be citizen and whether it includes derogatory information that is passed along to immigration officials.
Some Applicants Have Waited Years
The Orlando lawsuit, argued by lawyers from the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, and others in Miami by 11 other plaintiffs, say the name checks have left their citizenship applications in a holding pattern for years.
Ana Santiago, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that as of March, the agency had 72,000 name checks pending with the FBI in which the applicant has waited more than six months.
That's less than 5 percent of the 1.5 million annual total.
For those waiting, however, that's little solace.
Jawad and his wife have been legal U.S. permanent residents for more than 11 years. They both passed their citizenship interviews Sept. 13, 2004. The name check kept them waiting for more than three years.
The ombudsman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a recent report that the "FBI name check process has limited value to public safety or national security, especially because in almost every case, the applicant is in the United States during the name check process, living or working without restriction."
Jawad said he doesn't mind the name check itself.
"We are absolutely in support of name-checking after Sept. 11 - but not to take that long of a time," he said. "One year is OK. Eighteen months? OK ... But not to take this long of a time. Because that makes you feel different. You feel little in comparison to other people. Your dignity, I feel, has been hurt."
The would-be citizens are suffering far more than a loss of dignity.
Danette Zaghari-Mask, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Orlando, said the delays have affected people financially as well. One Orlando plaintiff, she said, wanted to bring his foreign-born wife here. Without his U.S. citizenship, she said, the only way he could do that was to bring her as a foreign student.
"She can't apply for a green card. She's paying out-of-country tuition," Zaghari-Mask said. "They've gone into significant financial ruin."
Others are hoping for enhanced job opportunities that come with U.S. citizenship. Some are separated from family members abroad.
For a long time, Kadom wanted to visit her parents abroad in Saudi Arabia, but her Iraqi passport expired while her U.S. citizenship was in limbo. One of the first things she did as a U.S. citizen was to apply for a passport for herself and her middle son, Abdullah, 17 - who with her petition automatically is granted citizenship because he is a minor - so the family can travel to see her parents.
"I already got my passport last week and we applied for my son's passport and we're waiting one week more," Kadom said. "And we're waiting for my husband's citizenship. We hope it will be soon."
Many Want To Participate In Democracy
There's another sense of urgency among many of the plaintiffs this year. In an extremely competitive presidential election year, many want to be citizens so they can vote in November.
That's the wish for El Shafey Ashour, an Egyptian and Spanish national who regularly discusses the political campaign with his U.S.-born wife, Beverly Raymond.
He applied for U.S. citizenship in the last presidential election year, in June 2004.
"I would like to vote in the elections very much," said Ashour, 42, who lives in St. Petersburg, owns a gas station and a convenience store, and is also studying for an acupuncturist degree.
"I'm not Republican. I'm not Democrat. Actually, I like the three candidates. Everybody has some ideas that I love. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, they have great ideas. But in the end when we see the Democrat and Republican nominees, then we'll really see their ideas."
He hopes that by that time, he'll be able to help choose the president in the country where he has been a legal permanent resident for more than six years.
"My wife contacted somebody here in Congress and he contacted the FBI and he asked about me," Ashour said. "The FBI's answer to him is they have millions like me. They can't take me before anybody else."……………
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/apr/19/na-lawsuit-loosens-citizenship-backlog
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