According an internal Homeland Security audit, the US Government has mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants from countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud who had pending deportation orders.

DHS officials identified an additional 953 people who had been naturalized despite outstanding deportation orders, though auditors couldn't determine if those immigrants had digital fingerprints on file or not.

The inspector general found that the immigrants used false names or birthdates to apply for citizenship with USCIS and such discrepancies weren't caught because their fingerprints were missing from government databases.

The report states fingerprints are missing from federal databases for as many as 315,000 immigrants with final deportation orders or who are fugitive criminals. ICE has not reviewed about 148,000 of those immigrants' files to add fingerprints to the digital record.

According to the Associated Press, "The gap was created because older, paper records were never added to fingerprint databases created by both the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI in the 1990s. ICE, the DHS agency responsible for finding and deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, didn't consistently add digital fingerprint records of immigrants whom agents encountered until 2010."

You can find the full report from the Office of Inspector General of Department of Homeland Security on their website.

You can download the PDF from us directly here.

The Office of Inspector General titled this press release, "Potentially Ineligible Individuals Have Been Granted U.S. Citizenship Because of Incomplete Fingerprint Records"