Becoming a U.S. citizen in San Diego takes longer than it used to.

While the number of citizenship applications has grown steadily across the country in the last four years, San Diego has far outpaced the national trend. Combined with increases in visa applications and policies from the Trump administration that require more time spent investigating many of those applicants, the rise in citizen-hopefuls has increased the average wait time to naturalize by several months.

In extreme cases, potential future citizens in San Diego can wait almost two years from when they file their initial paperwork to their oath ceremonies while the average case takes closer to 10 months.

Ginger Jacobs, an immigration attorney, recalled cases taking between one and two years to process after 9/11 when noncitizens were highly scrutinized by the federal government but the wait times had dropped significantly in the following years.


A year ago, people waited about six months start-to-finish to naturalize, Jacobs said.

The number of San Diegans applying for citizenship has more than doubled in the last four years — from 9,352 to 20,630. Nationally, the number of citizenship applications rose 27.4 percent — from 773,811 to 986,142 — during the same time frame.

Most of San Diego’s dramatic increase happened during the most recent election season and in the year following President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Juan Manuel Licona Terrazas, 67, became a U.S. citizen at the monthly oath ceremony in March.


“It was a dream I didn’t think would ever come true,” Licona said in Spanish. He worried that his English was not strong enough to pass the required tests.

Licona first came to the U.S. in 1996 and was granted asylum in 2002 because he was afraid of being persecuted in Mexico due to his sexual orientation.

He felt happy to have his green card, and time passed, much longer than the required five years for him to become a citizen.

What finally pushed him to try was a combination of fear as an immigrant under the Trump administration, even though he had a green card, and wanting to vote in the next election. He went to a naturalization workshop hosted by Alliance San Diego and found support to help him study.


The process took about a year, he said, from when he first turned in his application. The waiting made him feel more stressed, but he focused on studying and was able to pass.

“It’s worth all the things you feel in the process,” Licona said. “There aren’t words to explain how fabulous it felt when they gave me that document.”

He feels more protected now, he said, especially when he travels to see his family in Mexico.

“My life changed. I can see things in another way,” Licona said. “I feel more freedom.”


Now that he’s a citizen, he wants to sponsor his mother to come to the U.S. so that he can take care of her.

A new tool released by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allows applicants to check how long the process has been taking in their area. It estimates that San Diegans will wait between 10.5 and 22 months to become citizens.

That’s the third longest wait in the country after Wichita, Kansas and Oakland Park, Florida.

Maria Elena Upson, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the tool is still in the pilot phase and that the agency is refining it.


“We are aware that the numbers don’t reflect reality,” Upson said. “We’re working towards making sure we provide accurate numbers.”

Because of the way the tool calculates the estimated waits, complex cases that require extra scrutiny may act as outliers skewing the projections higher than they should be.

The tool also tells applicants how long they have to wait before they can ask USCIS why they haven’t heard back. The inquiry date for San Diego was listed in late June 2016 when checked by the San Diego Union-Tribune on Thursday.

“You’re looking at potentially 22 months that you’re not able to inquire about a case that was filed and hasn’t been schedule for an interview,” said Kimberley Best Robidoux, an immigration attorney who chairs a working group that meets regularly with USCIS. “That’s a long time to not be able to inquire about a case.”


Sometimes green cards expire while people are waiting, Robidoux said, and they have to go to USCIS to get a special stamp in their passports to keep their status. That adds more work to agency staff.

Last year, in response to an executive order from the president, the agency began requiring in-person interviews for more types of visa applications. Many predicted the change would bog down processing for any type of application handled by USCIS, including people waiting to naturalize.

The agency saw a 5.5 percent increase in overall application volume between fiscal 2016 and 2017, which also added to the workload for USCIS staff.

“We will not compromise national security for the sake of speeding up an application,” Upson said.


Clean applications shouldn’t take as long as those that require additional scrutiny, she said.

USCIS is having more employees work overtime and is hiring to fill vacancies to try to mitigate the issue, according to Upson.

Robidoux said she’s seen the local office of the agency working hard to keep up, scheduling extra interviews on Saturdays and planning double oath ceremonies every month this summer through September.

The agency’s San Diego office processed more applications than it received in the last quarter of fiscal 2017, a change from the middle of the year when it processed closer to half of what was coming in, according to data from USCIS. That reduced the number of pending applications from a peak of over 14,000 in the second quarter to about 11,200 at the end of the fiscal year.


Jacobs said for some of her cases, USCIS officers have asked her clients more involved questions about how they got their green cards than she’d seen in recent years.

One of her more complex naturalization cases took about 15 months. The man, who had to have two interviews with USCIS before getting approved, applied in September 2016 and will have his ceremony in May 2018.

Itzel Guillen, immigrant integration manager at Alliance San Diego, said that people have a mix of reactions when they find out the process can take that long.

Some think that they need to apply as soon as possible while others put off the process, especially if they have trips abroad coming up, Guillen said.


She encouraged people interested in voting in the 2020 election to apply as soon as possible. There’s already a risk now that they won’t make it in time if they wait, she said.

The nonprofit’s naturalization workshop schedule is available at readynowsandiego.org.


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