From the Washington Post:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency’s busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 citizenship applications last year without the necessary files, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
…
“It only takes one missing file of somebody with links to a terrorist organization to become an American citizen,” said Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
But wait, there’s hope:
An agency official said workers probably checked most of the files but failed to make note of it.
They’re talking here about the 30,000 applications which have no record of primary file access. Very comforting. Until you find out why they were checking in the first place:
The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s audit arm, conducted the review at the request of Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) after U.S. authorities granted citizenship in 2002 to a man without checking his primary file. The file, which was lost, indicated ties to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah.
