The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has denied that the modifications to military service requirements in the Oath of Allegiance published on July 21 flout the law, despite harsh criticism from immigration experts and members of Congress.
“Candidates for citizenship normally declare that they will ‘bear arms on behalf of the United States’ and ‘perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States’ when required by law,” stated USCIS on July 21. “A candidate may be eligible to exclude these two clauses based on religious training and belief or a conscientious objection.”
The new guidelines, which appear under the heading “Modifications to Oath of Allegiance for Naturalization,” state that a candidate “is not required to belong to a specific church or religion, follow a particular theology or belief, or to have had religious training in order to qualify,” and “may submit, but is not required to provide, an attestation from a religious or other type of organization, as well as other evidence to establish eligibility.”
Immigration experts and some on Capitol Hill say that this represents a substantive change, and a bill has been introduced in Congress to roll back USCIS’s actions.
Christopher Bentley, the chief of media relations at USCIS, denies that the changes are at odds with the law, and says that the July 22 message was meant for internal use by USCIS employees.
“There are no changes, the law has been quite clear since 1952 that modifications are allowed should individuals have religious-based or conscientious objector-based objections to saying those parts of the Oath of Allegiance,” said Bentley. “So that’s always been the case and people have always been allowed to in essence opt out of saying that if they have those firmly held beliefs.”
Bentley said that this new guidance was not meant to be a public announcement, but rather an internal announcement to USCIS officers. Because the agency wants to be transparent as possible, Bentley says they let the public know what was in the policy manual.
“That policy manual was intended for our employees to help make sure that they’re making consistent decisions in immigration cases as opposed to informing the public of something writ large—we weren’t doing that, we were making sure that our employees understood so they could make good decisions.”
Bentley says that immigrants still have to be able to document that the objection is a firmly held belief.
Via: WFB
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