Hundreds of thousands of citizenship applications and other immigration procedures have been blocked for months due to the closure due to the coronavirus pandemic of the archive centers where essential documents for these procedures are kept.
The Federal Regional Centers, overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration, are limestone caves built under the Kansas City metropolitan area where papers needed for citizenship applications and other paperwork are stored, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Many of these centers closed during the pandemic
and now serve only emergency cases, which has prevented hundreds of thousands of applicants from accessing the necessary documentation.
Participants stand for the presentation of the colors during a naturalization ceremony at the Great Park in Irvine, California.
Media News Group via Getty Images.
More than 350,000 applications for immigration records are held
in the National Archives and Records Administration, according to the aforementioned media, although not all of them correspond to applications for citizenship.
The lack of documents has hurt people like Shawntel Went, who has been waiting for a response to his citizenship application since May 2020, shortly after the pandemic began in the United States.
Recently, the Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), which processes these applications, responded that the necessary documents for your request
were being held in one of the Federal Regional Centers.
"They don't want to open the office and go get the documents, it doesn't make sense," Went lamented.
I have an appointment for citizenship but the removal of the conditional residence is still pending.
Will this affect my process?
Oct. 28, 202100:50
The National Archives and Records Administration responded to The Wall Street Journal that since the start of the pandemic it is only keeping
25% of its staff in the Kansas City offices
because it is "an area of high transmissibility" of COVID-19.
The agency, however, assured the aforementioned media that since last week it has established two work shifts to respond to the number of requests delayed by these measures.
A bureaucratic nightmare
A couple of doctors from Israel, who work in Boston hospitals and who chose not to give their names, applied for citizenship in September 2020. The husband has already gone through the interview process, while their spouse has not yet heard from them.
Susan Cohen, an attorney representing them, learned that the wife's papers were being held at the Kansas City offices, but has received
no explanation
as to why this happened to her paperwork and not her husband's.
[Thousands of Americans try to renounce their nationality and can't]
"This situation has turned into a Kafkaesque bureaucratic immigration nightmare, applicants deserve better," Cohen said.
Bureaucratic delays have caused the
processing times for citizenship applications to increase
during the pandemic, rising from an average of nine months in 2019 to one year, according to the aforementioned newspaper.
