Responding to revelations that more than 180,000 foreigners became citizens last year without complete background checks, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has begun the process of stripping nearly 5,000 persons of their citizenship. In these cases, the person losing their citizenship either had a criminal arrest that would have resulted in a denial of citizenship or the applicant lied about his or her criminal history. In the 2,000 cases where a person is losing citizenship because of lying on the application form on the question of prior arrests, the arrest would not make the person inelibible for citizenship.
The INS emphasized that despite the denaturalizations, more than 1,000,000 people got their citizenship last year and that the program generally works well. Nevertheless, the INS continues to be criticized for lax background checking.
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