Summary
- This years marks the 30th anniversary of the Clinton administration’s Citizenship USA scandal. CUSA is a cautionary tale, a case study in what can happen when an agency goes all in on pushing through the adjudications mill a staggering number of applications by a politically set deadline that cannot possibly be achieved without mass rubber-stamping. It is a case study in what can happen when an agency believes its “customers” to be the aliens seeking valuable immigration benefits such as naturalization for which they must qualify, rather than the American people, and the prospect of an infusion of new and reputedly favorably disposed voters is dangled in front of the party in power. We will never know how many criminal and other ineligible aliens were wrongly naturalized during CUSA and have been voting in our elections to this day.
- The Immigration and Naturalization Service launched CUSA in the summer of 1995 in response to a rapidly growing backlog in naturalization applications. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General concluded that “INS failed to address known system weaknesses before implementing a program that they knew would tax that system as it never had been taxed before” and that given its “lack of commitment to repair the deficiencies, the promise of backlog reduction within one year also meant a certain recklessness about the quality of the resulting adjudications”.
- The OIG began an investigation after reports surfaced “that some INS offices were naturalizing applicants so quickly that applicant criminal history reports … were arriving in INS offices only after the applicant had been sworn in as a United States citizen … suggest[ing] that INS had sacrificed naturalization processing integrity in the name of processing applicants more quickly”.
- Advocacy groups had promised the Clinton administration that faster naturalizations would mean more Democratic voters in the upcoming 1996 election, including for the Clinton-Gore ticket. Following complaints that CUSA wasn’t producing more citizens fast enough, Vice President Al Gore told his “reinventing government” office (the National Performance Review) to intervene. The goal of one NPR official leading the effort was to “produce a million new citizens before election day”. The OIG concluded that “the White House and NPR attention to and involvement with CUSA did add pressure on INS officials to increase production and make good on INS’ previously announced ambitious goals”.
- What were the consequences? In March 1997, DOJ reported that of the 1,049,867 naturalizations between August 31, 1995, and September 30, 1996, the FBI had returned the proffered fingerprint cards in 124,111 cases as not suitable for comparison and the FBI had no record of conducting any fingerprint checks in 61,366 additional cases. The OIG’s conclusion: “[F]or 18 percent of those persons naturalized during CUSA, INS had not conducted a complete criminal history background check.” As a result, more than 6,000 cases were referred to INS for possible denaturalization proceedings. Of course, only a handful of former criminal aliens were ever denaturalized.
- The OIG concluded that it was “unable to make any conclusive determination whether White House officials sought to use the CUSA program as a means of increasing Democratic turnout in the 1996 general election”. But the OIG did concede that “it is certainly true that the prospect of an impending general election was present in the thinking of a number of White House officials who pressed INS to accelerate its naturalization efforts”. You can draw your own conclusions.
- I have no illusions that a sorry episode like this cannot happen again.
“Citizenship USA”
As the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) described:
Beginning in 1993, the demand for naturalization began to increase at a staggering rate and application backlogs developed at INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] offices throughout the country. By June 1995, INS was receiving applications for naturalization at a rate twice as high as it had the previous year. INS projected that without a serious effort to reduce this application backlog, by the summer of 1996 an eligible applicant would have to wait three years from the date of application to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen.
The surge in applications was not a surprise to INS. As then Center for Immigration Studies Senior Fellow, and now Policy Director for the Immigration Accountability Project, Rosemary Jenks testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on April 30, 1997, “INS expected a surge in new applications because of a combination of factors, including the 2.7 million beneficiaries of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act … amnesty becoming eligible” to naturalize.
This backlog begat “Citizenship USA” (CUSA). The OIG explained that:
On August 31, 1995, INS Commissioner Doris M. Meissner announced … an initiative to reduce the backlog of pending naturalization applications to the point where an eligible applicant would be naturalized within six months of application. The goal of the initiative was to reach this level of processing “currency” within one year. … To reach the CUSA goal, INS dramatically increased its naturalization workforce in the Key Cities [Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco], opened new offices dedicated to naturalization adjudication, and engaged new processing strategies in an effort to “streamline” the naturalization process.
And then Vice President Al Gore and the White House got involved. The OIG stated that:
In a written response to an OIG question, the Vice President [Al Gore] specifically states that it was his decision to involve [The National Performance Review of the Office of the Vice President] NPR in the CUSA program. Elaine Kamarck, Policy Advisor to the Vice President, told the OIG that the Vice President personally asked her — as the person on the Vice President’s staff to whom the Director of NPR reported — to have NPR examine the CUSA program.
You can readily surmise what happened next. The OIG wrote that “[i]n the spring of 1996 … media reports began to question the integrity of INS naturalization processing”, elaborating that:
In May 1996, The Washington Times published an article about INS employees who criticized the acceleration of naturalization processing … [and] questioned the motives of CUSA. [NPR] had targeted CUSA for “reinvention”… . This link between the naturalization initiative and the Vice President’s Office during an election year fueled speculation and media stories that the rush to naturalize approximately one million applicants during fiscal year 1996 was an attempt to swell voting rolls with new citizens who were anticipated to vote for Democratic candidates, including President Clinton and Vice President Gore.
The OIG explained that at subsequent congressional hearings, “INS employees … testified to the extraordinary rush imposed on naturalization adjudications during CUSA[ that,] according to these witnesses, meant that INS had naturalized people without ensuring that they were eligible.”
Of particular concern, the OIG noted that:
[R]eports [surfaced] that some INS offices were naturalizing applicants so quickly that applicant criminal history reports — generated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after INS submitted applicant fingerprint cards for analysis — were arriving in INS offices only after the applicant had been sworn in as a United States citizen. These and other allegations of flaws in naturalization processing suggested that INS had sacrificed naturalization processing integrity in the name of processing applicants more quickly. [Emphasis in original.]
On March 5, 1997, the Washington Post published an extraordinary editorial, writing that:
Six months ago, Republicans were accusing [the Clinton administration] of trying to make political use of the [INS]. The charge was that the White House had put the arm on the INS to speed up and cut corners in the naturalization process, the theory being that new citizens would more likely vote Democratic than Republican, and therefore the more of them, the merrier.
The editorial noted the Clinton administration’s defense — “there was no way it would do a thing like that, manipulate the citizenship process for political gain” — and concluded that “folks believed it”. In fact, “We ourselves wrote sympathetically that … [‘]the administration replies that there are good and innocent reasons …’.”
Then came the extraordinary part. The Post concluded that the Clinton administration had been duping all the folks who had foolishly believed it (including, presumably, the Post):
So now, guess what? It turns out the White House was in fact leaning on the INS to hasten the process, in part in hopes of creating new Democratic voters. There are documents that amply show as much.
The Democratic defense — the current version — is that some of this [the INS naturalizing applicants with criminal records who should have been barred] may indeed have occurred, but not because of political interference. Rather, it was the result of simple bungling. You are told now that you shouldn’t take the political meddling … seriously not because it didn’t happen but because it was ineffectual. Now there’s a comfort.
Small comfort, indeed.
In April 1997, DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich announced the initiation of an OIG investigation into CUSA.
Of course, there is nothing new under the sun regarding an administration perverting the naturalization process for political gain. On May 3, 1798, almost two hundred years earlier, U.S. Representative John Allen (Federalist-Conn.) “alluded to the vast number of naturalizations which lately took place in [Washington, D.C.] to support a particular party in a particular election” during the U.S. House of Representatives’ floor debate on the Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798.
It’s Criminal How Many Criminal Aliens the Clinton Administration Naturalized
DOJ engaged the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick to, in the OIG’s words, “oversee a systematic review of CUSA naturalizations that INS would conduct using INS employees”, “first concentrated on determining whether each person naturalized during CUSA had a fingerprint check conducted by the FBI” and then “determin[ing] how many persons had naturalized during CUSA despite a disqualifying criminal history”.
What were the review’s findings? The OIG wrote that:
The KPMG-supervised review continued over the course of the next two years, but even its preliminary results were troubling. In March 1997, [DOJ] reported to Congress that of the 1,049,867 persons INS had then identified as having naturalized between August 31, 1995, and September 30, 1996, the fingerprint cards of 124,111 had been returned by the FBI as “unclassifiable,” meaning that the fingerprints submitted had not been suitable for comparison. For an additional 61,366 persons, the FBI had no record of having conducted any fingerprint check.
The upshot? The OIG concluded that “for 18 percent of those persons naturalized during CUSA, INS had not conducted a complete criminal history background check”. OIG further wrote that “The KPMG-supervised reviews of criminal histories relating to citizens naturalized during CUSA resulted in more than 6,000 cases being referred to INS’ Office of General Counsel for possible denaturalization proceedings.” How did KPMG come up with this number? The OIG explained:
INS collected rap sheets [from the FBI for those naturalized persons who had undergone a full fingerprint comparison and for whom the FBI had some criminal history record] and A-files [aliens’ permanent INS files] “to determine if any naturalized citizens failed to establish good moral character at the date of naturalization” based on the applicant’s criminal history or failure to reveal a criminal history.
The OIG further explained that “the review team examined the files of the 17,257 cases in which the rap sheet indicated a felony and/or CIMT [crime involving moral turpitude] arrest” and divided them into three categories:
If … the FBI’s criminal history report … did not refute INS’ original decision to naturalize, the case was determined to be “proper.”
If the rap sheet or case file did not contain dispositions of arrests or other information necessary to make such a determination, the case was determined to “require[s] further action,” as were cases in which the applicant failed to reveal his/her criminal history in the adjudication process.
“[P]resumptively ineligible[]” identified cases in which the information in the file or rap sheet demonstrated that the applicant should have been precluded from naturalizing because of his or her criminal history.
The results were as follows: 10,535 cases (63 percent) were deemed “proper”, 5,954 (35 percent) “require[d] further action”, and 369 (2 percent) were “presumptively ineligible”. Of the cases that required further action, the OIG found that:
3,580 had rap sheets indicating crimes that could have rendered the applicant ineligible for naturalization. However, these cases needed further review because information about dispositions of arrests and other matters was not in the file. The remaining 2,374 cases concerned applicants’ possible “failures to reveal” relevant criminal history. These cases, together with the … “presumptively ineligible” cases, were submitted to INS … in order to obtain the additional information needed to make a more definitive judgment on whether denaturalization proceedings were warranted.
The review team later reviewed “almost 2,600 additional rap sheets and other miscellaneous documents [found at] INS offices” and 300 that “had been ‘in transit’ at the time the case history review began”. Among these:
[T]he review team found an additional 192 cases had been naturalized during CUSA even though the applicant had a record of a felony/CIMT. The team requested the A-files for these 192 individuals, but INS was able to provide only 167 of the files. Of these … 1 case was determined to be “presumptively ineligible,” 126 “required further action,” and 34 were determined to be “proper.”
The OIG reported that, as of May 2000, Clinton administration U.S. attorneys had only agreed to bring denaturalization proceedings in federal court regarding 27 CUSA naturalizations, and only four persons had been denaturalized.
INS — “A Certain Recklessness”
How had INS’s inexcusable security lapses occurred? The OIG concluded that:
[INS] had long tolerated a degree of error in its processes … [and used] this approach in administering one of the most significant checks in the naturalization system — the check against the possibility of bestowing citizenship on someone with a disqualifying criminal record. … [I]t was not an ignorance of the problems so much as an acceptance of them.
In fact, in another damning finding the OIG concluded that this “suggested that INS had done little to improve its fingerprint processing procedures since 1994, when both the OIG and the General Accounting Office (GAO) had issued reports critical of those procedures and had recommended specific improvements that INS had agreed to undertake.” (OIG, “Alien Fingerprint Requirements in the Immigration and Naturalization Service”; GAO, “INS Fingerprinting of Aliens: Efforts to Ensure Authenticity of Aliens’ Fingerprints”) Indeed, Rosemary Jenks explained in her testimony before Congress that:
[The OIG] report … identified three major problems … 1) the INS had no way to verify that the fingerprints submitted by an applicant actually belonged to that applicant since the INS was no longer taking the fingerprints itself; 2) some applications were wrongly approved because the FBI had not completed the criminal history check before the interview was scheduled or because the FBI “hit” had not been properly filed; and 3) INS often did not resubmit new fingerprint cards when the FBI rejected the original set as illegible.
To add insult to injury, Douglas Farbrother, one of “the two [NPR] staff members assigned primarily responsibility for working with INS to ‘reinvent’ the naturalization initiative” and whose metaphorical fingerprints were all over the Clinton administration’s politicization of CUSA, wrote in an e-mail that:
I am working with the FBI to find a way to tighten up the ridiculously loose fingerprint check system, i.e. INS doesn’t know who’s [sic] prints they have, the prints are often too smudged for the FBI to read, and INS simply assumes that everything is okay if they hear nothing back from the FBI (which is 90% of the time). [Emphasis added.]
Farbrother also told the OIG that he also “remembered calling … the INS’ fingerprint system ‘ridiculously loose[]’” in a March 15, 1996, meeting with Commissioner Meissner.
So, even one of the White House officials responsible for the Clinton administration’s meddling in CUSA couldn’t help but to conclude that the INS’s handling of criminal history checks was a joke!
But relying on a known-to-be derelict fingerprint check system — without even trying to duct tape it together — was not INS’s only inexcusable action with regards to CUSA. The OIG concluded that “the integrity of naturalization adjudications, already vulnerable before CUSA, suffered badly as a result of INS’ efforts to process naturalization applications more quickly”, elaborating that:
Naturalization processing before CUSA already displayed significant weaknesses that compromised the quality of adjudications. … All of these factors were known to Commissioner Meissner and her staff, and yet INS decided to launch CUSA and thus accelerate a processing system that already was in need of considerable repair.
[T]he principle of increased production was pursued at the expense of accuracy in the determination of applicant eligibility, and a process previously regarded as lacking safeguards became even more vulnerable.
[E]fforts to meet th[e] deadlines undermined the quality of naturalization adjudications during fiscal year 1996. … INS advanced its production goal despite the known risks that accelerated production would pose to its proper evaluation of applications for citizenship.
INS’ single-minded focus on processing cases to meet [its] goals, in turn, led to a series of mistakes, shortcuts, and mismanagement that adversely affected the quality of naturalizations conducted during the CUSA program.
The OIG further explained that:
Under the pressure of production goals … the evaluation of naturalization eligibility became more perfunctory. Adjudicators were trained and instructed to concentrate primarily on the minimal statutory criteria. In addition, their inquiries were limited by the frequent unavailability of the crucial tools of naturalization processing: applicant criminal history checks and [A-files]. The procedures on which INS relied to make these tools available to adjudicators, clerical and automated processes, experienced even greater strain as production expectations increased.
INS imposed an ambitious production goal on this vulnerable system, and failed to consider the impact of attempting to reach this goal on matters other than production.
When CUSA ran into problems, INS simply doubled down. The OIG found that:
When it became clear, by early 1996, that CUSA was behind schedule … instead of adjusting the goal of the program INS adjusted its approach to getting the work done: additional pressure was added to swiftly increase production. On March 1, 1996, Headquarters issued a memorandum to the Field that specifically instructed that all applications for naturalization received by the end of that month had to be completed — either denied or approved and the applicant sworn in — by September 30, 1996.
This was not just incompetence on the part of INS, it was knowing incompetence, damn the consequences. The OIG came to the damning conclusion that:
[INS] failed to address known system weaknesses before implementing a program that they knew would tax that system as it never had been taxed before. Given the known weaknesses in the system and the lack of commitment to repair the deficiencies, the promise of backlog reduction within one year also meant a certain recklessness about the quality of the resulting adjudications.
Yet, incredibly, on October 18, 1996, Commissioner Meissner had the gall to inform U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) that INS had “made numerous improvements to the [naturalization] process, and [had] addressed this workload with efficiency and integrity”.
The Clinton/Gore White House Makes a Bad Situation Worse
Pressure from the White House only exacerbated INS’s self-created debacle. The OIG concluded that:
We believe that the White House and NPR attention to and involvement with CUSA did add pressure on INS officials to increase production and make good on INS’ previously announced ambitious goals.
NPR officials’ focus on accelerating the pace of naturalizations — while giving all too little thought to the quality of adjudications even though they recognized obvious weaknesses — imposed additional stress upon a process that, even without their intervention, was substantially flawed.
The OIG did conclude that “In evaluating NPR’s effect on CUSA, we found that it had little direct negative impact on the program.” (Emphasis added.) However, the OIG conceded that:
In large part, this is because INS resisted much of the NPR’s efforts to make major changes in how they conducted business. Further, Farbrother’s primary recommendation (delegate broad authority over naturalization processing to Field managers) was properly rejected by INS management as too risky … [and s]ome of Farbrother’s other ideas, like engineering his own appointment as Deputy Commissioner of INS, were rejected by [Policy Advisor to the Vice President Elaine] Kamarck.
And the OIG also chided the NPR for “miss[ing] a prime opportunity to improve the CUSA program and, therefore, the quality of INS’ naturalization process as a whole”:
Farbrother … realized that, to use Farbrother’s words, INS’ fingerprint process was “ridiculously flawed,” and that the testing system and other aspects of the INS naturalization process were equally deficient. Had NPR spent more time studying INS processes and less time pressing for a dramatic influx of new personnel, it is possible that NPR could have suggested some responsible changes that would have allowed INS to thoughtfully make progress on its backlog.
But that was not to be:
Instead, NPR staff simply plunged into the issue with little knowledge about the system they sought to redesign. They also spent almost no time trying to improve the process. Rather, their efforts were primarily focused on increasing the number of bodies available to perform adjudications which they believed would speed the process.
In the end, the OIG decided that the INS had acted so recklessly that “it is possible that INS would have persevered on the same production schedule even without pressure from the White House and NPR”, and “Consequently, there is no way for us to quantify the impact of this added pressure on INS’ management errors.”
Was Citizenship USA a “Citizenship/Clinton Voter Mill”? The Office of the Inspector General’s Evidence
The OIG wrote that “the absence of standards, the acceleration of production, and the many resulting mistakes did raise the question in the public mind — a public that was largely unaware of INS’ widespread pre-existing problems — of why a government agency would so risk the quality of its work in the name of production goals.” Further, “INS’ willingness to step-up naturalization production before repairing known system weaknesses and its lack of guidance to the Field concerning how to increase production without decreasing the quality of adjudications served to make INS employees, the public, and Members of Congress suspicious of the motives for INS’ aggressive production goals.”
What could INS’s motives have been? The OIG reasoned that:
[T]he disproportionate focus on production, and the solicitous but unstructured approach INS adopted for its “partnerships” with community-based organizations, combined with intervention by officials from [NPR], made INS Headquarters vulnerable to allegations that its efforts were not genuine attempts to reduce the backlog but rather were a politically motivated attempt to swell the voter rolls in time for the November 1996 election.
Ah, the 1996 election, including President Clinton’s race for a second term. But why would swelling the voter rolls be so swell for Democratic candidates? Well, first and foremost, because that was what interest groups were telling the White House.
The OIG wrote that “Shortly before a January 1996 meeting between members of the congressional Hispanic Caucus and [Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold] Ickes, Ickes’ staff asked Stephen Warnath from the [White House’s] Domestic Policy Council to prepare a memorandum addressing issues likely to be raised.” The OIG revealed that:
Warnath wrote that “the Caucus’s view is that faster naturalization means more potential Democratic voters in the next election — especially if it is supported with statements by the President that are more supportive of legal immigrants.” The memorandum alerted Ickes that Congressman Xavier Becerra from Los Angeles would likely complain that “the Administration’s Citizenship U.S.A. program is inadequate to maximize this potential” because of delays in the program that have resulted in increased backlogs. [Emphasis added.]
The OIG also revealed that Daniel Solis, head of Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization, “sent a letter dated September 25, 1995, to [Hilary Clinton] in which he … ‘noted that naturalizing new citizens at a record pace could give the ‘Democrats a strategic advantage at next year’s Convention’ as Chicago’s naturalization applicants ‘represent thousands of potential voters’”. (Emphasis added.)
The OIG wrote that on January 29, 1996, a Service Employee’s International Union official forwarded to the White House a letter she had received from Father Miguel Vega and Fred Ross, which was then forwarded to an aid of Ickes. Father Vega was director of the Southern California Industrial Areas Foundation/Active Citizenship Campaign (IAF/ACC) and Ross was “in charge of … one of the four organizations that had formed” the ACC. The OIG revealed that:
In their letter, Vega and Ross complained about the slow pace of the backlog reduction effort, and noted that if this pace continued in Los Angeles applicants whose paperwork had been submitted after December 1995 would not be naturalized in time to register to vote in the November 1996 election.
Sarah Taylor from INS Congressional Relations told the OIG that she spoke to a staff member from Congressman Howard Berman’s [D-Calif.] office who reported that IAF/ACC was outraged about the naturalization backlog and was telling Administration officials [including White House Director of Special Projects Rahm Emanuel and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros] that more naturalizations could mean more Democratic votes in the 1996 election. [Emphasis added.]
The OIG also revealed that:
At the January 30[, 1996,] meeting between IAF/ACC affiliates and Commissioner Meissner, Father Vega repeated his complaints about the speed of naturalization processing. He pointedly stated that unless INS moved faster to naturalize new citizens, a number of applicants would not receive citizenship in time to vote in the November election.
The next day, Solis … and several IAF representatives met with Emanuel at the White House. Solis told the OIG that Emanuel seemed very interested when the IAF representatives noted that the backlog of naturalization applicants represented potential votes for the Clinton-Gore campaign. Whether Emanuel’s interest was real and reflected political acumen or merely politeness is a question that his refusal to be interviewed has made more difficult to answer. [Emphasis added.]
In regards to Emanuel’s refusal to speak to the OIG, the OIG reported that “several former White House employees declined our request for an interview”, including Ickes and Emanuel. Further, the OIG “sought an interview with Vice President Gore but he declined our request”. While Gore did agree to “answer[] written questions”, “his answers were drafted in the third person and no attestation [as to their truth] was provided”.
In any event, the OIG also revealed that:
A letter from Father Vega to Vice President Gore dated February 14, 1996 … contained a copy of a column that appeared in the January 22, 1996, edition of the Los Angeles Times that mentioned … the naturalization backlog[] and the fact that new citizens represented potential Democratic votes in the 1996 election. The column pointedly stated that by focusing on enforcement while allowing the naturalization backlog to grow, “the administration may be blowing a great chance to create a whole lot of pro-Clinton voters.” [Emphasis added.]
The OIG then noted that:
During the same period, the IAF/ACC was in contact with HUD Secretary Cisneros. On February 15, 1996, Cisneros forwarded a memorandum to the President and Vice President that had been drafted by IAF/ACC … [and] noted that IAF/ACC would register 26,000 new citizens to vote, would identify and turn out 52,000 “occasional voters, conduct 5,000 house meetings, encourage vote by mail and create voter interest around issues of Affirmative Action and Minimum Wage.” The memorandum further committed IAF/ACC to “influence 300,000 voters” and “turn out 96,000 voters for the 1996 presidential election.”
The OIG concluded that while “[w]e are unable to ascertain the effect of these letters on White House motivations”, they “explicitly laid out the partisan political benefits that an accelerated naturalization program could provide”.
The OIG noted that “Commissioner Meissner said she expressed concern … that it was ‘dangerous’ for the White House to get too involved in INS’ naturalization program because such involvement might be seen as electorally motivated.” How involved was the White House? The OIG “found several pieces of evidence showing that the White House was aware of and interested in the connection between naturalization, voting, and the 1996 election”.
President Bill Clinton. The OIG reported that, at least according to Douglas Farbrother, it was President Clinton, not Vice President Gore, who initiated White House involvement with CUSA:
Farbrother told the OIG that in the first meeting that he had with [Elaine] Kamarck about CUSA, she told him the background of why NPR was getting involved. According to Farbrother, Kamarck said that the President had learned from someone that there were large numbers of immigrants who had applied for citizenship in Southern California and the President was interested in naturalization because he thought this group would mostly vote for him. Farbrother said that Kamarck told him the President asked the Vice President to have NPR “take a look” at the citizenship backlog. [Emphasis added.]
However, the OIG reported that Kamarck “denied telling Farbrother that the President’s interest in the CUSA program was driven by a desire to create potential Democratic voters”.
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold Ickes. The OIG reported that “In September 1995, as the CUSA program was about to begin, Ickes asked Kevin O’Keefe, a Deputy Assistant to the President, to look into INS’ naturalization backlog and voter registration efforts at naturalization ceremonies.” Further, in March 2006:
Ickes asked O’Keefe for additional information on voter registration at naturalization ceremonies. O’Keefe responded in a memorandum dated March 13, 1996, reporting on his review “of the process of voter registration in naturalization ceremonies” and noting that in a “mass ceremony” planned in Chicago, “the registration attempt” would be “coordinated with Skinny Sheehan [sic], our best field organizer. Sheehan is trying to see how a voter registration could be conducted when a crowd in the thousands are sworn in.” At the time the memorandum was written, James “Skinny” Sheahan was the Director of Special Events for the City of Chicago. Sheahan had been a longtime Democratic field organizer in Chicago.
Skinny Sheehan? You can’t make this stuff up.
In any event, “O’Keefe denied that this memorandum referred to any effort to use the naturalization process for partisan ends,” while Skinny Sheehan told the OIG that “he did not recall whether his office had assisted in coordinating naturalization ceremonies … in 1996” and “did not recall any discussions with O'Keefe about voter registration”. Wasn’t that an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Total Non-Recall?
Policy Advisor to the Vice President Elaine Kamarck. The OIG found that:
On April 24, 1996, Father Vega wrote Kamarck, thanking her for her efforts in helping to “recreate” INS and noting that CUSA’s progress could mean “as many as 229,000 new citizens voting in Los Angeles this November,” and that nationwide, “some 800,000 will become citizens in time for the election.” Kamarck passed Vega’s letter on to the Vice President with a cover note that said “[t]hought you might like to see this response from Father Vega. He seems very pleased with you.”
The OIG revealed that:
Kamarck ... [prepared] a memorandum, dated April 4, 1996 … for the Vice President to update him on the progress of the CUSA program in anticipation of one of his weekly lunch meetings with President Clinton. … Kamarck proclaimed: “Only by working 7 days a week and longer hours can we hope to make a significant enough dent in the backlog that it will show up when it matters.” [Emphasis in original.]
“When it matters”? Could that have been in time to vote in the 1996 presidential election? The OIG reported that:
Asked about her statement … Kamarck said the phrase meant that the Administration needed to show that it was making demonstrable progress toward reducing the naturalization backlog to silence critics.
When asked whether she agreed that the phrase … could be interpreted to indicate a need to naturalize people in time for the election, Kamarck told the OIG that she understood how some people could construe it that way, but said that was not what she intended.
When asked how the Vice President was supposed to understand her reference to “when it matters,” …. she assumed he understood her intended meaning because he, too, had heard the numerous complaints about the slow pace of INS’ naturalization efforts from immigrant advocates.
What did Vice President Gore think? His written response to the OIG stated that he “does not know what Ms. Kamarck intended by the phrase ‘when it matters,’ but he did understand that this was an important issue to Latinos and that, if the Administration was going to receive recognition for resolving it, the Administration needed to act expeditiously”.
It is comforting to know that “When interviewed by the OIG, Kamarck denied that she was involved in or aware of any attempts to use CUSA to create potential Clinton-Gore voters.” The OIG also reported that:
Kamarck said the possibility that progress on CUSA could create more potential Democratic voters had not come up during her discussions with the Vice President or anyone else at the White House, Department of Justice, or INS, though she was aware that Father Vega and other advocates had urged that applicants be naturalized before the election.
By the way, the OIG wrote that “According to Farbrother, Kamarck … told him, in a joking way, to concentrate his efforts on Southern California and that she may have said they did not know how the Asians in San Francisco would vote and the Cubans in Miami were Republicans.” LOL. Kamarck told the OIG that “she specifically told Farbrother to visit all the key CUSA cities, especially Miami, because she was aware that, in an election year, NPR’s activities might be attacked as politically motivated.”
Douglas Farbrother: The National Performance Review’s “Raging Inexorable Thunderlizard of Reinvention”. OIG stated that it focused on “email messages to the Vice President and others from Douglas Farbrother … [that] connected CUSA’s goals with the goal of naturalizing one million new citizens in time for the November 1996 election”.
The OIG explained that Farbrother and Laurie Lyons were “the two [NPR] staff members assigned primarily responsibility for working with INS to ‘reinvent’ the naturalization initiative”, that Elaine “Kamarck … decided to assign [Farbrother] to work full-time on the CUSA project”, and that he “believed he would need assistance and he recruited Laurie Lyons, his officemate”. According to the OIG, Lyons had been detailed from the Office of Government Ethics in 1994.
Farbrother’s self-bestowed title at NPR was “The Raging Inexorable Thunderlizard of Reinvention” and Lyons’ was “The Vanguardian Angel of Reinvention”. The OIG noted that “such ‘superhuman’ titles, according to Farbrother, were encouraged at a management training seminar for ‘reinventors’ that he attended”.
The OIG revealed that on March 28, 1996, Farbrother wrote in an e-mail to Vice President Gore that “I had bet Elaine that INS headquarters would not give their managers … enough authority, in general, to make me confident they could produce a million new citizens before election day. Unfortunately, I was right.” The OIG added that “Farbrother went on to complain that INS’ failure to delegate sufficient authority to field managers had worked to limit the pace of naturalizations” and that he stated in conclusion that “I could go on. But the point is that, unless we blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on the front-line managers, we are going to have way too many people still waiting for citizenship in November.”
The OIG asked Farbrother why his e-mail “had alluded to the goal of producing ‘a million new citizens before election day’”:
Farbrother said that he believed that applicants should be naturalized in time for the election, as he thought that the main reason people want to be citizens is because they want to vote. He asserted that his goal and NPR’s goal was to serve the public, and the only way for INS to serve the people caught in the backlog was to naturalize them in time for the election. Farbrother told the OIG that because he believed the Vice President shared this goal of delivering customer service, he thought that his reference to the upcoming election would lead the Vice President to increase the pressure on INS.
The OIG also asked this question of Kamarck (to whom Farbrother also sent the e-mail):
Kamarck said only that the reference to creating a million new citizens before the election could “look bad” to people unfamiliar with Farbrother’s manner. While conceding that it had occurred to her that CUSA’s goal of creating more than a million new citizens by the end of the fiscal year might aid the Democrats in the 1996 campaign, she did not think that INS could accomplish this goal and said she never discussed these thoughts with Farbrother or anyone else.
The OIG noted that INS’s “customers”, in Farbrother’s mind, were the naturalization “applicants who had paid a fee … and who were then required to wait many months before INS acted on their applications for citizenship”. The OIG rightly opined that “by focusing only on serving those ‘customers,’ he and NPR did not serve the larger public who have a right to expect that INS will administer its responsibilities with integrity to ensure that only those applicants who qualify for naturalization will receive this important benefit”.
In any event, the OIG wrote that the next day Farbrother sent an e-mail to Kamarck in which he wrote that “To blunt any charge that we are running a citizenship/Clinton voter mill, I am working with the FBI to find a way to tighten up the ridiculously loose fingerprint check system. … A breakthrough here will look good to the anti-alien lobby.”
Then, “Farbrother on his own initiative drafted an ‘options memo’ in late March ostensibly to be presented by Vice President Gore to President Clinton as a means of getting INS to adopt his reinvention ideas.” He sent one version to Kamarck, NPR Director Robert Stone, and Lyons on April 2, 1996:
In it, Farbrother offered two options: “To get anywhere near a million applicants naturalized before the summer is out, we are clearly going to force some serious ‘reinvention’ on INS.” Farbrother wrote that “Doris Meissner warns that if we are too aggressive at removing the roadblocks to success, we might be publicly criticized for running a pro-Democrat voter mill and risk having Congress stop us.” Later in the memorandum, he wrote that “we can reduce — but not eliminate — the risk of controversy over our motives” by putting “one of our proven NPR reinventors into a position of authority in INS. ... The other option was “to avoid any controversy over speeding up naturalization by letting the standard bureaucracy do the best it can.”
Lyons sent another draft to INS CUSA Project Director David Rosenberg. In it, “Farbrother suggested several options to speed naturalization, including … lowering the standards for citizenship. ... This memorandum caused great consternation at INS Headquarters because, among other things, it put on paper the suggestion that adjudicative standards should be lowered.”
The OIG noted that both Kamarck and Farbrother stated that neither of these drafts were ever given to the president or the vice president. “According to Farbrother … he had used the technique of drafting a memorandum from the Vice President to the President [merely] to get Commissioner Meissner’s attention.” He also told OIG “that he had not been advocating that citizenship standards be lowered”.
Laurie Lyons, the National Performance Review’s “Vanguardian Angel of Reinvention”. The OIG reported that:
As a result of their interactions with [Lyons], several New York [INS office] managers told the OIG that they became concerned about her motivations. One … recalled Lyons saying that “we need to get this done in time for the election.” A supervisor recalled that, during a March 1996 meeting … Lyons asked “if the applicants would be naturalized by October,” which this manager understood to be a reference to the registration deadline for the November 1996 election. A third manager recalled that when she had explained to Lyons that fingerprint checks could not be conducted for applicants after they naturalized and had questioned Lyons about the rush, Lyons had responded, “How are they going to vote? ... They have to be citizens to vote.”
Deputy Assistant to the President Kevin O’Keefe. The OIG revealed a September 26, 1995, memorandum from Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to Kevin O'Keefe that “discussed INS naturalization initiatives and included a page entitled ‘Talking Points Re Voter Registration’” and “noted that due to INS’ limited resources, it would have to rely on partnerships with other organizations to expand voter registration opportunities”. O’Keefe sent the memo to Harold Ickes along with a cover letter that stated that “the pace of naturalization will limit the number of new voters.”
The OIG stated that O’Keefe contended that:
[T]he notion that accelerated naturalization processing would create potential Democratic voters did not come up in any discussions to which he had been a party. While he could not affirmatively state that this issue had not crossed the minds of anyone at the White House, O’Keefe said he did not recall anyone verbalizing the idea to him.
Was Citizenship USA a “Citizenship/Clinton Voter Mill”? The Office of the Inspector General’s Conclusions
The OIG asked “[W]as the CUSA program conceived and implemented [by INS] as a means of increasing the turnout of Democratic voters in 1996?” It exonerated INS from charges of partisan motivation, though not, of course, for its incompetence and recklessness. The OIG concluded that “[w]e found no evidence of any such motivation on the part of INS’ leadership”, that it “did not find that CUSA was developed, implemented, or otherwise directed to further inappropriate political ends”, and that INS officials “were not acting out of partisan political motives”. In a sort of backhanded compliment, the OIG stated that “our investigation found that the poorly managed CUSA program was initiated by INS (without White House input) as a legitimate response to a growing backlog of naturalization applications”, though “many INS employees questioned the legitimacy of CUSA because they suspected it grew out of partisan purposes”.
As to the White House, the OIG asked “To what extent, if any, did [the] White House involvement [in CUSA] reflect a desire to increase the Democratic turnout at the 1996 general election?” What did the OIG conclude?
As an initial matter, the OIG conceded that the actions of the White House could have created a perception of impropriety, writing that “Certainly the possibility that White House involvement in CUSA could be perceived as improper occurred to many people, including Commissioner Meissner, who recalled having voiced her concerns to Emanuel and to both Attorney General Reno and Deputy Attorney General Gorelick.”
As to whether the White House had actual malign motives, it is certainly true that “as Commissioner Meissner told the OIG, the White House is not a ‘monolith’ and it contains a number of officials whose agendas differ”. The OIG concluded that “varying or mixed motives concerning the involvement of NPR in CUSA may have existed in the minds of different White House officials”.
But, beyond this, the OIG sent its own varying or mixed messages. On the one hand, it concluded that “we cannot precisely pin down the institutional or personal motivations of the relevant actors” and “we are unable to make any conclusive determination whether White House officials sought to use the CUSA program as a means of increasing Democratic turnout in the 1996 general election”.
On the other hand, at various times the OIG intimated that increasing the number of Democratic votes cast did seem to be one of the factors motivating the White House to intervene. The OIG “found evidence that White House officials were interested in INS’ naturalization program for a variety of reasons, including ‘political’ reasons that related to the November 1996 election” and that “it is certainly true that the prospect of an impending general election was present in the thinking of a number of White House officials who pressed INS to accelerate its naturalization efforts”.
The OIG pointed to “[t]he comments of former [White House] Chief of Staff [Leon] Panetta” as “highlight[ing] the difficulty of delineating motivations in this case”:
[Panetta] told the OIG … that it was only natural to assume that people, in this case immigrants, who felt a political party was targeting them would turn against that party in the voting booths. But, Panetta said, as far as he was concerned the expectation of this backlash was not “the main reason” why the White House sought to increase the pace of naturalization. The “[m]ain reason for us to do it is because people who apply for their citizenship are entitled to have the government do it in a time frame and in a process that is efficient and effective in response to their needs[.]” [Emphasis added.]
So, was Panetta admitting that while, in his mind, increasing the number of Democratic voters was not the main reason for the White House’s intervention in CUSA, it was one of the reasons? Why did the OIG not press Panetta on this point?
Of course, no one could deny that, as the OIG concluded, “The record does show … that particularly in response to calls by community groups and other concerned parties, White House officials were quite aware of the electoral dimensions of the naturalization backlog.” The OIG took the next logical step and stated that “[i]t would be surprising” if the contention by activists that the Democratic Party could benefit by naturalizing more immigrants “did not engender consideration by some White House officials that accelerated naturalization could affect the election”.
The OIG also stated that “[w]e found some evidence that does indicate an awareness by White House officials that increased naturalization might increase the Democratic turnout in 1996” and that “it is clear that the end result of CUSA’s success — the naturalization of one million people by September 30, 1996 — was appreciated by … some administration officials who agreed to be interviewed as a goal that could have electoral benefits”.
However:
The officials involved in these incidents who agreed to be interviewed (or, in the Vice President’s case, to provide information) denied that this evidence indicates that they were trying to run a Democratic “voter mill” as alleged by Members of Congress. In general, they asserted that interest in the election was driven by the immigrant groups’ own desire — which had been forcefully expressed to the White House — to vote in an election they deemed of overriding importance.
OIG agreed “that in itself is not necessarily indicative of any improper partisan motivation”.
So, the White House’s desire was not to run a Democratic “voter mill”, it was rather simply to satisfy the immigrant advocacy groups’ desire that the administration run a Democratic voter mill. And to so satisfy the groups, the administration had to run a Democratic voter mill!
Then the OIG lost all credibility, contending that:
White House officials may have been sensitive of the need to naturalize as many new citizens as possible in time for the 1996 general election without having any specific goal of increasing Democratic turnout. Of course, their goal could equally have been the improved delivery of services to a deserving population or, for that matter, the appeasement of some very angry critics. Both of these alternative motivations may be “political” in the larger sense of the word, in that the efficient delivery of service and the satisfaction of interest groups can often promote electoral success. But these are not the troubling partisan goals condemned by CUSA’s critics.
What? “White House officials may have been sensitive of the need to naturalize as many new citizens as possible in time for the 1996 general election without having any specific goal of increasing Democratic turnout”? I guess that in the abstract this is a logical possibility. But to think that supremely political animals such as President Clinton, Harold Ickles, and Rahm Emanuel could have had such “sensitivity” without having had the goal of increasing Democratic votes is simply ludicrous. Were they hoping against hope that the newly naturalized voters would vote for Bob Dole?
Finally, the OIG contended that:
[T]he White House/NPR interest in CUSA did not result in INS lowering standards or changing its procedures in order to get more applicants naturalized in time for the 1996 election in the hope they would vote for the Democratic Party, as alleged.
[E]ven if certain officials in the White House viewed CUSA as a means to increase the pool of potential Democratic voters, the evidence does not indicate that there was any widespread marshaling of forces within the White House to accomplish such an end.
The evidence … does [not] support a claim that the White House and NPR hijacked the program to bend it toward such an electoral gain.
How does this square with the OIG’s prior conclusions that “the White House and NPR attention to and involvement with CUSA did add pressure on INS officials to increase production and make good on INS’ previously announced ambitious goals” and “imposed additional stress upon a process that, even without their intervention, was substantially flawed”?
Conclusion
As Rosemary Jenks stated in her April 30, 1997, testimony before Congress, “the integrity of the naturalization process is always more important than expediency”.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of CUSA, a cautionary tale, a case study in what can happen when expediency becomes more important than integrity. It is a case study in what can happen when an agency goes all-in on pushing through the adjudications mill a staggering number of applications by a politically set deadline that cannot possibly be achieved without mass rubber-stamping. It is a case study in what can happen when an agency believes its “customers” to be aliens seeking the grant of a valuable immigration benefit such as naturalization for which they must qualify rather than the American people, and the prospect of an infusion of new and reputedly favorably disposed voters is dangled in front of the party in power. We will never know how many criminal and other ineligible aliens were wrongly naturalized during CUSA and have been voting in our elections to this day.
I have no illusions that a sorry episode like this cannot happen again.