Free Republic

EXC: Biden Exec Order Hints At Removal Of Oath Of Allegiance For New Migrants.The Executive Order on Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans outlines the White House effort to “promote naturalization” in section five. The order outlines how various people – including the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security – would conduct a review of existing components of the immigration process. Among the barriers to citizenship potentially on the chopping block is the oath of allegiance – which requires citizens to “renounce and abjure...

...the Trump administration just crossed off another to-do list item... ...Officials under President Donald Trump unveiled the new civics test on Friday that replaces a President George W. Bush-era test that's been used for the last 12 years. It's the final hurdle to naturalization before America's immigrants receive their decision from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and take the Oath of Allegiance in a naturalization ceremony. ...Changes are also coming to the testing procedure and scoring.

President Donald J. Trump participates in a naturalization ceremony in the Cross Hall of the White House Monday, August 25, 2020.

I share with you a letter I wrote to friends in 1999, on the day of my wife's naturalization ceremony Vice President Mike Pence paid tribute to 16 new Americans from 12 different nations Thursday at a naturalization ceremony in Washington. Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, gave the oath. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung. No one thought for a moment of taking a knee. On the contrary, the new citizens who immigrated here from a variety of countries – including Turkey, Ethiopia and El Salvador – were all...

Two men born in Iraq who came to the U.S. as refugees were set to appear in court Friday on terror-related charges in California and Texas, as investigators say one of the men wrote that he wanted to travel to Syria because he was "eager to see blood." A criminal complaint unsealed Thursday accused 23-year-old Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, of Sacramento, Calif., of traveling to Syria to fight alongside terrorist organizations and lying to government investigators about it. Almost simultaneously in Houston, federal authorities announced the arrest of Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, 24, on charges of attempting to provide...

...We've been following the path toward fulfilling the American dream for one of those people for years now. He's an Iraqi man who served as an interpreter for the Minnesota National Guard while supporting U.S. forces in Basra in 2009. But, when the soldiers left, Khalid Awda became a marked man having helped American troops. For more than three years, his military comrade turned close friend, Sergeant Paul Braun, worked to bring Khalid to Minnesota. Khalid finally arrived in 2013, but his family couldn't come for a few more years, arriving in late 2016. The wait to become a U.S....

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that she probably loves the United States more than natural born U.S. citizens.Omar came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia."Something that I get criticized for all the time. It's not what you think, so don't gasp," Omar said at the Netroots Nation conference in Philadelphia on Saturday during a panel discussion titled, A Vision for Progressive Foreign Policy in the 2020 Elections and Beyond. “It is that I am anti-American because I criticize the United States.” Omar continued, "I believe, as an immigrant, I probably love this country more than anyone...

As if the separation of families at the border and the travel ban were not enough, the Trump administration has a denaturalization initiative that is stoking controversy. A few weeks ago, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director L. Francis Cissna told the Associated Press that his agency is hiring dozens of attorneys to form a task force to review the records of people who have become U.S. citizens since 1990, in order to identify people who deliberately lied on their citizenship applications. “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases...

The Obama administration granted citizenship to 2,500 Iranians, including family members of government officials, while negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, a senior cleric and member of parliament has claimed. Hojjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zolnour, who is chairman of Iran’s parliamentary nuclear committee and a member of its national security and foreign affairs committee, made the allegations during an interview with the country’s Etemad newspaper, cited by the country’s Fars News agency. He claimed it was done as a favor to senior Iranian officials linked to President Hassan Rouhani, and he alleged the move sparked a competition among Iranian officials over whose...

In response to a recent The Hill article that covered the latest lawsuit for birthright citizenship, the Hon. Delegate to Congress for AMERICAN SAMOA, Amata Radewagen, wrote “the Hill’s headline ‘American Samoa residents sue for citizenship’ is not accurate”.

Twenty-one cities, several of them sanctuary cities, have pledged to make one million immigrants American citizens by the end of 2017. The Naturalize Now initiative is aimed at preventing illegal immigrants from deportation under the Trump administration. President Trump is not against legal immigration, but has promised to crack down on illegal residency in the U.S., especially of criminals. The cities include New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Jersey City, NJ; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Pittsburgh, PA; and Tucson, AZ. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles and other progressive elected officials...

A left-wing Dutch vegan who campaigned against cowbells in the Swiss village where she lives has had a request for a Swiss passport thrown out after annoying the locals. Nancy Holten, who was born in the Netherlands but moved to Switzerland at the age of eight, is a fluent speaker of Swiss German and has children who are Swiss nationals.

Federal immigration officials are halting all scheduled naturalization ceremonies because their digital information system failed to run background checks on an untold number of applicants, according to an email obtained by House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte. The scope of the problem — including how many naturalization applications in the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials already approved without proper background checks — is unclear. “Effective immediately, offices are instructed not to approve or oath any naturalization cases in ELIS (Electronic Immigration System),” a Nov. 29 email marked “urgent” from USCIS...

Add voter fraud to the list of Arcan Cetin’s offenses. Cetin, 20, is the Turkish immigrant arrested Saturday for the Friday night shooting and killing of five people in a Burlington, Washington, mall. Security camera’s show Cetin entering the mall briefly without a weapon, leaving and then returning with a rifle. Cetin fled but was apprehended 24 hours later. He has reportedly confessed to the five murders. Now, election officials and Washington Secretary of State, Kim Wyman, have confirmed that Cetin was illegally registered to vote and voted in three elections in the state in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Cetin...

Jose Fernandez -the NL Rookie of the Year in 2013 - came to the United States by boat as a 15-year-old Cuban refugee in 2008. Along the way, he rescued his mother, who had fallen overboard. However, his beloved grandmother, who Fernandez calls a “baseball freak,” was left behind.“She’s the love of my life... my everything,” Fernandez said. The day before winning the Rookie of the Year Award, a shocked Fernandez was reunited with his grandmother in Florida with help from Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government has mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants from countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud who had pending deportation orders, according to an internal Homeland Security audit released Monday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government has mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants from countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud who had pending deportation orders, according to an internal Homeland Security audit released Monday.

WASHINGTON – Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell, appointed by President Obama to the District Court for the District of Columbia, left out “so help me God” while administering the Oath of Allegiance at a naturalization ceremony Wednesday. Howell asked the new U.S. citizens to raise their right hand and “repeat the ‘Oath of Allegiance’ after me.” According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the oath goes: "I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a...

The latest story about an NFL player and a flag began Tuesday morning just after 11, in the great hall of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins building. All 45 candidates for naturalization held miniature American flags as they sat in plastic chairs and listened to government officials deliver paeans to the power of immigration. Those included the first two candidates in the front row, perhaps the smallest and the biggest of the 45. There was tiny Dahlia Lyons, a native of the Philippines and the only military spouse in the ceremony. And next to her was the 6-foot-5...

A 104-year-old Jamaican mother became a naturalized U.S. citizen Friday, after living two decades in South Florida.