June 17, 2022
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency responsible for processing citizenship requests, says it is rapidly clearing up a huge backlog of citizenship applications that were piled up with little or no action when the coronavirus shut down most USCIS operations.
The major block has been at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which operates miles of limestone caves under the Kansas City area, where millions of individuals’ immigration histories are stored. Citizenship officers are required to look through those histories when considering an immigration application. Before the pandemic, the citizenship agency routinely requested those immigration histories from the archives in Kansas City without a problem.
Due to Covid-19, the National Archives stopped responding to all but emergency requests. That paused thousands of citizenship applications from moving ahead.
The average citizenship case currently takes about 11 months to be completed, according to government data, up from nine months before the pandemic and six months at the end of the Obama Administration.
The situation has improved in recent months, lawyers have told The Wall Street Journal, which has been reporting on the backlog. In March, the National Archives fully reopened its facilities and as of May was processing all incoming requests, the Journal reported.
There are currently 87,500 pending requests for immigration histories with the National Archives, down from a high of 350,000 in January, the agency said. (Not all of those are for citizenship applications.)