More than 50 congressional Democrats have sent a letter bemoaning the massive backlog in approving new citizenship applications that has built up, saying it "undermines public trust" that people now have to wait as long as 16 months before getting approved, The Washington Times reported on Monday.
"The agency clearly needs to invest further resources and increase staff to expand capacity and return processing times to the agency's stated goal of six months or less," wrote the congressmen, led by Reps. Zoe Lofgren of California and Luis Gutierrez of Illinois.
The demand for action came after a report released last week by the National Partnership for New Americans, an alliance of immigrants' rights groups, said there were nearly 730,000 pending naturalization applications as of the end of last year, a more than 87 percent increase since 2015 under President Barack Obama.
"The Trump administration has built a second wall that prevents legal immigrants in the U.S. from becoming voting U.S. citizens," National Partnership for New Americans executive director Joshua Hoyt told NBC News, emphasizing that this means some of them will not be allowed to vote in November's midterm elections.
"This is either absolute gross incompetence affecting close to a million legal immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens, or it is an intentional second wall that is designed to slow the pace at which lawfully present immigrants can become voters," he added.
However, according to the Times, the main surge in those awaiting a decision on citizenship occurred during the Obama presidency, going from 388, 832 at the beginning of 2016 to 636,164 at the end of that year.
The backlog did hit a peak of 781,126 as of June 30, 2017 during the Trump administration, but since then the number was been cut to 729,400 by the end of the year.
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