Fight over Right to Restrict Naturalizations for Troops, Revived by the Biden Admin, Blasted by ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is slamming the Biden administration and the Department of Defense for continuing to fight a legal battle over whether the military can offer service members an expedited path to citizenship.

For more than half a century, the U.S. military has offered some sort of expedited path to citizenship for immigrants who have volunteered to serve. However, in October 2017, the Trump administration added requirements and delayed the start of the naturalization process for eligible service members.

In 2020, a group of noncitizen troops sued over the policy and won. However, Justice Department lawyers appealed the case. The Biden administration initially paused the proceedings, but it has now resumed arguing it should have the power to reimpose the restrictions.

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"The Biden administration should have abandoned President Trump's cruel and unlawful policy years ago," Scarlet Kim, a staff attorney at the ACLU, said in a press release. "Following years of delay, it's disappointing to see the Administration defend a policy that would deprive thousands of service members the expedited path to citizenship they are entitled to."

At the heart of the debate is the idea of when the Pentagon would certify a service member's service as honorable -- the necessary first step before a green-card holder could apply for expedited naturalization. Before the Trump policy, that used to happen just days into boot camp or initial training. The 2017 policy change pushed it out to 180 days.

The result, according to the initial complaint filed in 2020, was that the policy "unlawfully obstructed the ability of thousands of service members to obtain U.S. citizenship, placing them in a state of personal and professional limbo."

Since the ACLU court victory, some services such as the Navy, have been holding naturalization ceremonies for service members who have just graduated from boot camp.

The latest government brief in the appeal, filed in August 2024, doesn't technically take exception with the policy change itself.

Instead, it argues that the Pentagon should legally retain the right to determine how long someone needs to serve in order to get that "honorable" determination, and that the law "confers broad discretion on the Department to promulgate standards for characterizing service."

The appeal hints that the Pentagon has not totally given up on instituting some sort of time requirement on aspiring citizens.

"The [Defense] Department has explained that it is reconsidering the issue of whether to impose a time-in-service requirement and, if so, what that requirement should be," a footnote in the appeal brief reads. "As such, the Department has reserved the right to reimpose such a requirement."

These arguments come at a time when each of the military services has just begun to recover from a multiyear slump in recruiting that led to shortages in many key jobs across the military.

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, since 2002, more than 170,000 service members have become naturalized citizens, but the 2017 policy change contributed to "a decrease in military naturalizations."

In 2019, just 4,360 service members became U.S. citizens. In the year after the ACLU won its court case, the figure shot up to 8,800, and most recently, in 2023, 12,140 troops became naturalized citizens.

The top five countries of birth, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, are the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria and China. Together, those five nations made up 38% of all military naturalizations since 2019.

Service members from the Army, including National Guard and Reserves, made up roughly two-thirds of all military naturalizations.

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