In another embarrassment for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, some 175 immigrants were approved for citizenship even though their names weren't properly run through the FBI's databases for background checks, The Washington Times reported.
The Obama administration admitted the breakdown in procedure and a halt was ordered for approving all new citizenship applications last week. Homeland Security officials blamed an ongoing process of digitalization for the problem, which affected about 15,000 applications.
Earlier this year, USCIS admitted it had mistakenly given citizenship to hundreds of criminals whose records went unnoticed, because the agency wasn't properly checking their fingerprints.
An internal audit discovered in those cases that only electronic records were checked, inadvertently ignoring tens of thousands of fingerprints which remain in paper files.
And just two weeks ago, Fox News' Tucker Carlson reported that the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that tens of thousands of green cards went missing, which could be improperly used by terrorists, criminals, and undocumented aliens to remain in the United States.
In the latest incident, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte was upset that USCIS officials did not notify him, as the chairman of the committee that oversees the agency, of the problem and only found out about it when a confidential source gave him an internal agency email that acknowledged what happened, The Daily Caller reported.
In a letter to USCIS, Goodlatte demanded it provide him details of the investigation into the problem and said it should take steps to strip citizenship from anyone who shouldn't have been approved.
Homeland Security spokesman Aaron Rodriguez insisted officials take the background process seriously, saying, "We will continue to employ multiple quality controls to ensure the integrity of the naturalization process."
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