The Obama administration mishandled immigrant applications for U.S. citizenship ahead of the 2016 election, leaving tens of thousands of eligible men and women stuck in uncertainty.
Applications for U.S. citizenship increased 14 percent in 2016 from the 2012 election year, which the Department of Homeland Security blamed for the problems, but the backlog rose by 64 percent over the same period, the Washington Times reported Sunday.
The government began last year with about 390,000 pending applications, which is about the usual number, and was averaging four months of processing time. It ended the year with more than 635,000 applications in its backlog and was taking far more than four months. In the final quarter of the year, it received nearly 240,000 applications and processed just 112,000–less than half its intake.
The problem can be traced to a new DHS computer system that was put in place last year, according to the department's watchdog. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services deployed the system to help transition the agency from a paper-based system to a digitized one.
The $1 billion computer system known as ELIS, a homage to Ellis Island, was so flawed that naturalization interviews and even citizenship ceremonies had to be canceled in case the immigrant applying for citizenship was not actually approved.
Douglas Rivlin, a spokesman for Democratic Rep. Luis Guiterrez (Il.), an outspoken advocate for eligible immigrants applying for citizenship, told the Times their Chicago office has been "getting lots of inquiries from people who are waiting for their citizenship applications to be processed, so we sensed there had been a slowdown."
The citizenship application issues were a blow for the Obama administration. Advocates of the computer system hoped it would have enabled hundreds of thousands of new citizens to register in time to vote against Donald Trump because of his immigration proposals.