The real number of people who got citizenship instead of deportation from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is more than double what the media initially reported, a footnote in the report reveals.
More than 1,800 people who were supposed to be deported were mistakenly granted citizenship, the footnote discovered by CNN’s Jake Tapper in the DHS Inspector General report shows. That’s more than double the 858 number initially reported by the media.
The report focuses on the use of digital fingerprinting by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which may explain why the 1,800 number was buried. The IG report found 858 people were granted citizenship under a fake identity that was not discovered, in part because their digital fingerprints were not available. The other 953 people mentioned in the footnote were not included in that figure, because the IG couldn’t determine whether the mixup was specifically related to fingerprint records.
The footnote increases the number of people who should have been deported from 858 to 1,811. All of those individuals are from “special interest countries,” which U.S. officials are specially concerned about in terms of national security.
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