Originally posted at CLASH Daily.
One of the most inept mistakes the US federal government makes is to send billions of dollars to dead people in the form of welfare, farm subsidies, and social security. Although economically wasteful, those sorts of errors do not threaten lives. After all, deceased people can’t hurt anyone, and although they’ve been known to vote a time or two, “corpse men” usually don’t cash checks.
Meanwhile, from a government that promises to be good stewards of our money, oversee healthcare for 300+ million people, and properly vet 110,000 ISIS–infiltrated Syrian refugees, a problem exists for the living. It’s hard to believe but, according to Inspector General John Roth of the Homeland Security Department, the government that sends checks to dead people, mistakenly granted citizenship to 800+ living breathing immigrants with pending deportation orders from countries that threaten national security, or with high rates of immigration fraud.
The auditors reported that America’s newest citizens used fraud and aliases to apply for citizenship with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Unfortunately for America, those incongruities weren’t caught because old records can’t be searched electronically, therefore immigrants from “special interest countries” didn’t have fingerprints on file in government databases.
This database gap occurred when obsolete fingerprint paper records were never added to the system that the defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI created in the 1990s. In addition, until 2010, neither ICE nor the DHS, both of which were responsible for locating and deporting illegal immigrants, were diligent about adding fingerprint records to their databases.
Bottom line: If the fingerprints were missing and there were gaps in the records, citizenship should never be granted to anyone.
So, after being “mistakenly awarded” US citizenship, instead of being sent back to places like Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan, nefarious characters, like three of the immigrants-turned-citizens who received aviation and transportation worker credentials used their US citizenship to receive security clearances where they had access to secure areas in air and seaports. In fact, the report states that a fourth person, whose lack of fingerprints did not deter his citizenship, is now a law enforcement officer, who didn’t, but could have, killed a lot of people with a gun hanging from his duty belt.
Since 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected, the government has specifically known about problems concerning 206 immigrants who applied for citizenship using aliases and discrepancies in biographical information. Yet despite the president’s massive push to flood America with immigrants, many of whom are coming from the Middle East, Customs and Border Protection did nothing to investigate or correct the “alias…discrepancy” problem or follow through on the 206 cases.
According to the Chicago Tribune:
Roth’s report noted that fingerprints are missing from federal databases for upwards of 315,000 immigrants with final deportation orders or who are fugitive criminals. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not reviewed about 148,000 of those immigrants’ files to add fingerprints to the digital record.
ICE officials told the DHS that many of these cases have not been pursued because federal prosecutors “generally did not accept immigration benefits fraud cases.” ICE also stated that the DOJ did agree to investigate cases involving people who have acquired security clearances, jobs of public trust, or other security credentials. Good idea.
The Chicago Tribune also reported that:
Roth’s report said federal prosecutors have accepted two criminal cases that led to the immigrants being stripped of their citizenship. But prosecutors declined another 26 cases. ICE is investigating 32 other cases after closing 90 investigations.
Roth recommended that all of the outstanding cases be reviewed and fingerprints in those cases be added to the government’s database and that immigration enforcement officials create a system to evaluate each of the cases of immigrants who were improperly granted citizenship. DHS officials agreed with the recommendations and said the agency is working to implement the changes.
So, for future reference, if a terrorist from a “special interest country” seeks American citizenship, all he or she needs to do for an alias is attain a government check sent to a dead person and a falsified birth certificate from Hawaii signed by a registrar named Mr. Ukulele.
Meanwhile, immigrants who run Afghani fried chicken joints in New Jersey and Somalis who like to slash their way through Minnesota malls are free to come and go as they please.
That’s why the whole mistaken citizenship thing is suspect. After all, granting citizenship to 800+ disreputable, fraudulent, dangerous potential terrorists does provide those like Obama who apologize for Islam a larger pool of homegrown terrorists to blame the mayhem on.
Either way, in the end, sending checks to the deceased and granting citizenship to 800+ could-be terrorists may be slip-ups. However, much like erasing confidential emails from a server in a bathroom closet, the latter “mistake” appears too politically expedient to not be purposeful.
