United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joseph Edlow told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that former President Joe Biden’s administration “truncated” vital security questions administered to foreign nationals seeking naturalized American citizenship to hike naturalizations and, as a result, reshape the nation’s electorate.
In February 2021, almost immediately after taking office, Biden signed an executive order enlisting USCIS and other federal agencies to help increase annual naturalizations — that is, granting foreign nationals naturalized American citizenship.
The order made clear that USCIS ought to “eliminate barriers in and otherwise improve the existing naturalization process … [and] substantially reduce current naturalization processing times…”
Edlow, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, reveals that the Biden administration appears to have carried out the executive order by, among other actions, shortening security questions for foreign nationals seeking citizenship.
“When the interview was being conducted, what I can tell you is they had gone ahead and truncated the security questions,” Edlow said.
“So instead of answering and confirming an applicant’s answers to every question, they went ahead and asked just very basic, general questions, and based on the answers to those, essentially assumed that the other answers were the same,” Edlow continued. “So it was, it was shortening the interview in a way that would have allowed for more people to go through the process.”
Indeed, the shortening of security questions worked in terms of meeting Biden’s goal of packing the United States electorate with millions of brand-new American citizens, born outside of the United States, who are now eligible to vote.
In fewer than four years, the Biden administration awarded citizenship to almost 3.5 million foreign nationals, which the Migration Policy Institute notes is “by far the most [naturalizations] of any single presidential term.”
For perspective, the number of foreign nationals who secured citizenship under Biden eclipses those who were awarded citizenship under former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, combined.
The result is that there are now 23 million naturalized Americans, born outside of the United States, who are eligible to vote in local, state, and federal elections.
Edlow said USCIS should not be focused on setting naturalization quotas.
“For me, it’s not about raw numbers. I don’t believe we should have quotas for how many naturalizations we do, how many adjustments we do. I want to make sure that the adjudicators are taking the proper amount of time to really screen and vet these individuals to make the determination that they are, in fact, qualified for the benefits that they are applying, including and most importantly, for naturalization,” Edlow said.
“So I don’t want to see an adjudicator have to get through X number of applications a day if they get through less, but they’re really diving deep,” he said. “That is a good adjudicator.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
