The leftist American Immigration Council — funded in part by George Soros and supportive of the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center — has sued the federal government to prioritize naturalizing individuals so that they will be eligible to vote in the 2022 midterm election.
The case cites the “unreasonable delay in processing naturalization applications.”
The council wrote about the lawsuit:
The suit seeks to require the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and USCIS to prioritize the retrieval of immigration files, and USCIS to schedule naturalization interviews without further delay. Plaintiffs are U.S. lawful permanent residents waiting to become U.S. citizens and whose applications are delayed because their immigration files remain in storage.
Naturalization applicants whose immigration files are stuck in a Federal Records Center, and remain inaccessible, are prejudiced by USCIS’ delay in a manner unlike any other applicants for immigration benefits. These applicants face a loss that other applicants for immigration benefits will not—the right to vote in the November 2022 elections.
Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) reported on the lawsuit, focusing on a homosexual man’s case.
“Can you tell me about some of the clients you represent?” NPR asked Kate Melloy Goettel, legal director of litigation at the Council:
“One of the clients is Thomas Carter. He’s filed suit because he’s very fearful that he and his husband could be separated if they don’t share the same citizenship,” Goettel said. “He also has an infant child, and I think that that has really encouraged him to want to have roots in the United States with his newly growing family. He’s also anxious to participate in the electoral process and to put down roots, so he’s one of the applicants who has been waiting since 2020 to be naturalized.”
“What are you asking the court to do?” NPR asked.
“So we’re asking the court to tell the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as well as the National Archives to prioritize these naturalization applications and to go in there and try to get these applications out so that they can move forward with processing the applications. As you can imagine, there’s a number of steps and bureaucratic process that has to take place in order to approve someone for naturalization, and that process takes many months. And so we’re really down to the wire now to get people naturalized for November’s election.”
The case is Carter v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, #1:22-cv-10803 for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
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