Fourteen green card holders are suing the federal government over being denied the ability to naturalize as U.S. citizens, despite meeting all the requirements. They want a judge to intervene and order government officials to schedule their naturalization ceremonies.
All of the individuals are permanent residents, originally from Haiti, Venezuela and Côte d'Ivoire. They are all eligible to naturalize: They are lawful permanent residents and have gone through the application process, and are clients of Project Citizenship, a Boston-based immigrant legal services nonprofit
"It can have career impacts for a lot of people who would like to have jobs that either preference or require U.S. citizenship," said Anna McDougall, a law student with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, which is representing the immigrants.
She said the clients had reached the end of the mandatory window for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to make a determination about their naturalizations, and hadn't heard back.
They're suing USCIS; the Department of Homeland Security; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and local and national officials associated with those agencies.
Last year, USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from countries deemed to be "high risk."
"It's hard not to look at it in any other way as a thinly veiled excuse for denying citizenship to people from certain countries based on their country of birth and not coincidentally based on the color of their skin or the religion that they practice," said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship.
The 14 green card holders argue that the government is making procedural errors and is also being discriminatory in pausing the immigration benefit applications — which include these naturalization applications — from people from 39 countries, which include Haiti, Venezuela and Côte d'Ivoire.
They want a federal judge to order USCIS to make a decision on their applications and schedule oath ceremonies.
Once green card holders file an application, there's an investigation into their background that can involve the FBI, biometric background checks that involve fingerprinting, interviews with agencies and civics and English tests. After that, USCIS either grants or denies the application within 120 days. If they grant it, immigrants who are naturalizing can either take the oath of citizenship at the USCIS office, or in a public ceremony, which is often at Faneuil Hall in Boston.
In December, GBH News first reported that several green card holders went to Faneuil Hall — known as the 'cradle of liberty' for the naturalization ceremonies — but were told by USCIS officials that they couldn't proceed due to their countries of origin.
"It creates a lot of stress and anxiety when you have people's oath ceremonies being canceled," said McDougall. "This is happening in conjunction with a lot other things like upticks in [immigration] enforcement. So not having the security of U.S. citizenship is incredibly stressful."
Sen. Ed Markey filed legislation after the incident that would bolster protections for those immigrants who have already gone through the arduous process of naturalization, but were denied or awaiting oath ceremonies.
GBH News has reached out to the agencies listed as defendants in the complaint but did not immediately receive any response.
USCIS justified its actions toward immigrants from specific countries in a recent memo that "prior screening and vetting measures were wholly inadequate." Applicants for naturalization and lawful permanent residence hadn't been "sufficiently vetted," officials wrote, and posed a national security risk.
To the plaintiffs awaiting their oath ceremonies specifically, the lawsuit contends USCIS "provided no relevant information regarding the reasons for the delays in Petitioners' naturalization application processes, at most citing only 'unforeseen circumstances.'"
Nearly 24,000 people naturalized in Massachusetts in fiscal year 2024, according to USCIS statistics.
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