U.S. moves to strip N.J. man of citizenship

The United States is moving to strip a New Jersey man of his citizenship, alleging that he failed to disclose a previous deportation order in his naturalization application, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

The move against Baljinder Singh of Carteret and two other men living in Connecticut and Florida, is part of a nationwide initiative to locate people who the government says were wrongfully granted citizenship despite the absence of at least some fingerprint records in a centralized digital database.

"The civil complaints charge that defendants in these cases exploited our immigration system and unlawfully secured the ultimate immigration benefit of naturalization,'' Chad A. Readler, the acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's Civil Division said in a statement. "The filing of these cases sends a clear message to immigration fraudsters — if you break our immigration laws, we will prosecute you and denaturalize you."

In a complaint it filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, the Justice Department claimed that Singh, was ordered deported in 1992 after he arrived in the United States aboard a flight from Hong Kong without a passport. Singh, who was born in India, was placed in removal proceedings and sought asylum, claiming that his name was Davinder Singh, according to the complaint.

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He was released on bond, but later Singh failed to appear in immigration court, prompting a judge to order him deported in January 1992, according to the complaint. A month later, Singh filed an asylum application under the name Baljinder Singh, and he later married a U.S. citizen. In 1996, his application for permanent residency was approved. He was granted citizenship in 2004 based on his permanent residency.

"Defendant's adjustment application, which did not disclose his alias of Davinder Singh or his immigration history, was granted,'' the complaint states. "Defendant subsequently obtained citizenship on the basis of his permanent residency." The complaint alleges that Singh was not eligible for lawful permanent residency because he had been ordered deported, and had lied about his identity and immigration history.

Singh could not be immediately reached Tuesday.

The New Jersey case, and similar complaints filed against two natives of Pakistan living in Connecticut and Florida, stemmed from a Department of Homeland Security initiative dubbed Operation Janus that has identified about 315,000 cases where some fingerprint data was missing from the centralized digital fingerprint repository, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Operation Janus was launched in 2010.

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Last year, the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security found that 858 people had been granted citizenship despite having been previously ordered deported or removed under another identity because their digital fingerprints were not available. The records were not available, according to a September 2016 report, because the old fingerprints had been taken on paper cards by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and had not been digitized and uploaded to the fingerprint repository.

ICE, according to the Inspector General's report, has been digitizing and uploading the fingerprints taken on paper cards, but the process has not been completed.

Operation Janus identified three people who did sensitive security work, including at airports and "maritime facilities and vessels", whose naturalization was revoked, according to the Inspector General's report. It also found a naturalized citizen who worked in law enforcement, the report stated.

Email: alvarado@northjersey.com