They risked their lives for America, but federal red tape is strangling the citizenship hopes of a new generation of foreign-born veterans.
Just ask Feyad Mohammed of Queens – it took him four tries and more than a year to become a citizen, and that was after two tours in Iraq.
Mohammed, 23, was born in Trinidad and was a legal resident when he enlisted in the US Army in 2003.
Becoming a citizen was a requirement of his Army contract, but his application didn’t go through properly until he got help from Sen. Charles Schumer’s office.
There are an estimated 34,000 foreign-born vets who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many are waiting months or years for the US Citizen and Immigration Services office to make them full-fledged Americans, according to Schumer.
Schumer’s new “Military Personnel Citizenship Processing” bill seeks to create a new office to speed up those background checks.
Introduced last week, the bill would require the CIS to process citizenship applications within six months.