Immigration attorneys on Long Island report that their clients have recently had U.S. citizenship and green card interviews canceled without explanation.
One of those cases involves a man who has been a lawful permanent resident for 30 years and had his naturalization interview canceled just a week before he was scheduled to appear at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Holtsville, according to his attorney, Andrea Rodriguez-Tarazi, who is based in Bohemia.
“He’s renewed his green card three times, so he’s as vetted as can be,” Rodriguez-Tarazi said. “The one client wants to become a citizen to petition his son, who is in Peru, but now that plan changes.”
Rodriguez-Tarazi said cancellations of this kind were “very rare,” and that the notice offered no explanation beyond saying the interview would be rescheduled at a later date.
“There isn’t much I can say to clients other than to be patient,” she said. “We have no idea when these will be rescheduled, so it’s tough to give guidance.”
The cancellations come as USCIS issued a Dec. 2 policy memo directing officers to place an immediate hold on many immigration benefit applications filed by people from 19 countries designated as “high risk,” pending additional review.
The countries on the list are Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Myanmar, the Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Yemen.
President Donald Trump has referenced a broader pause on immigration in public statements, including a post on Truth Social in which he wrote that he intended to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”
The Central American Refugee Center in Hempstead has also heard from clients whose naturalization interviews were abruptly canceled, said legal director Jessica Greenberg. She said the organization began receiving reports of unexplained cancellations around the time the USCIS memo was issued.
“These are individuals who have gone through the rigors, who have been screened, who have gone through all the security and background checks,” she said. “They’ve been green card holders for years, contributing members of society, and they are just taking the next step, and now they can no longer proceed.”
Greenberg said CARECEN has primarily heard from Haitian and Venezuelan clients on Long Island, with some Cuban nationals also affected. She said that in her roughly 15 years working in immigration services, she has never seen interview cancellations like those now being reported.
“Sometimes files don’t arrive in the office, or an officer is out for the day. Those things happen, not often, but they happen,” she said. “They are quickly rescheduled, and they come with an explanation. These are just cancellations.”
The cancellations may not be limited to applicants from the 19 designated countries. Rodriguez-Tarazi said her client, whose interview was canceled, is from Ecuador, a country not included in the policy.
“This move is definitely part of a bigger pattern,” she said. “This is one more way to prevent people who can ‘do it the right way’ from fixing their status.”
Advocates report similar concerns statewide, according to Mario Bruzzone, vice president of policy at the New York Immigration Coalition. He said the current pause differs from previous immigration policy changes, which he described as “bureaucratic hurdles” that often still allowed applications to move forward.
“Folks who came through the refugee and asylum systems have been tremendously vetted already,” Bruzzone said. “USCIS doesn’t have the capacity to re-interview hundreds of thousands of people while pausing all adjudications at the same time.”
Alexander Holtzman, director of the Deportation Defense Clinic at Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law, said the cancellations appear to be occurring more frequently than in the past.
He said he has seen reports from other attorneys describing last-minute cancellations of naturalization ceremonies, sometimes with “additional background checks” cited as the reason.
“These cancellations are problematic and seem to be happening at a higher rate during this Trump Administration than previously,” he said. “It is a challenging time for clients who have done so much and are at the last stage of becoming U.S. citizens.”
Holtzman, who also serves on CARECEN’s board, pointed to Nassau County’s recent 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which allows local police officers to perform certain federal immigration enforcement functions, as a factor that distinguishes Long Island from other regions.
His clinic is challenging the agreement in court alongside the New York Civil Liberties Union and LatinoJustice.
“These individuals have done what was demanded of them,” Greenberg said. “This is not fair. This is wrong. This needs to be rectified quickly.”
