The National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of refugee and immigration groups, has released several reports about the number of naturalization applications pending under President Donald Trump. The national backlog increased from 388,832 at the start of the 2016 fiscal year when Barack Obama was the US President, to 729,400 at the start of the 2018 fiscal year.
Although the Montgomery office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) saw a fall from 835 to 797 in applications from the final quarter of the 2017 fiscal year to the first quarter of the 2018 fiscal year, the backlog rose to 4,727 this year, an increase of 213% and the biggest in the country, with Maine coming in second place, at 13%.
A spokeswoman for USCIS said that the Montgomery office only opened in June 2017. This meant it was in a unique situation with most of the staff still being trained and therefore did not process the same number of cases as more established offices, adding that the true face of Montgomery processing will not be known until numbers from the third quarter of the 2018 fiscal year are revealed in September.
Officials at USCIS have denied the claims made by the National Partnership for New Americans about the nationwide backlog, saying that the agency has kept up with demand despite the rise in applications.