I heard that in the United States, there’s a very undesirable question that is meant to catch out non convicted criminals.
Have you ever committed a crime or offense for which you were not arrested?
Just wondering how often does USCIS come back and revoke citizenship after making a discovery of an undeclared crime and to what extent of severity would an undeclared crime not be grounds for revokation?
Well, petty crimes aren’t generally investigated in a means that would catch you months later. Nobody is going to DNA sample (if they could) that piss you took in an alleyway or put effort into catching you 3 months after you shoplifted a candybar. Nobody is going to analyze your facebook posts and determine you probably committed a DUI. Petty crimes are ones you got caught in the act for.
Now, if you’re seriously embezzling or trying to hide your serial killing habit, you have bigger problems than worrying about revocation of citizenship. It does sound like if you got caught for a big huge crime like that with a major, expensive investigation, *then * the prosecutor/detective team might come up with proof as to some past dates you were doing crime and *maybe *report you to USCIS.
But that’s kind of a minor problem, in fact, getting deported might be a good thing if that happened. In the US, after release from prison for a major crime you’re basically done. Most jobs will no longer be available to you, and you probably can’t travel to another country because you will be turned away by their immigration service. (there is a way they can run your passport and look up convictions).
Get deported back to a third world country, and maybe you can use your sweet embezzling skills refined in the USA in your new job and background checks probably won’t even show the past crime. (unless the company pays for a very expensive check that checks internationally)
"Have you ever committed a crime or offense for which you were not arrested?" Sounds like a nonsense question. If you answer “yes”, you may as well not bother to complete the form.
If they asked "Have you ever been investigated for a crime or offense for which you were not arrested?, it would make more sense.
Who is asking this question of whom? Under what circumstances?
If you’re ‘non convicted’, how exactly are you a ‘criminal’?
You heard? Where did you hear this?
(Some context would be awesome for those not actually inside your head!)
OP is an abbreviated version of one of an actual questions in the N-400 form to initiate the citizenship application process: “Have you EVER commited, assisted in committing or attempted to commit, a crime or offense for which you were NOT arrested?” Form N-400 PDF Part 12, question 22 (page 14).
For offenses where there *were *actual arrests/charges/convictions (questions 23-28), an explanation is requested and the form clearly instructs that you must absolutely report those even if the record was sealed, expunged or cleared. But it does not instruct so for this one, you are stuck with Y/N.
And yeah this has all the looks of a fine piece of legalistic weaselwork so that at the very least if something comes up later (e.g. you were the one procuring boys for the local Archbishop) they can get you for not completely disclosing absolutely everything in the form.
Presumably it’s not an automatic disqualification as protests against dictatorships and the like would be covered. Some people are proud to have been arrested and prosecuted for protesting against such regimes.
Maybe the disqual isn’t automatic, but it’s not good for your case. You’re relying on the mercy of bureaucrats to treat you fairly.
I wonder if it should/would not work the other way round.
Any human old enough to walk cannot truthfully answer ‘no’ to question 22 as quoted by JRDelirious. Everyone has committed at least theft and assault. So a ‘no’ automatically means you have been lying on your citizenship application.
I’m not sure about that. Mens rea or its absence actually, might mean a child cannot have been said to have committed a crime. And even at older ages, I’m not sure stealing a cookie from the cookie jar qualifies as a crime.
Has anyone here never committed the offense of jaywalking? I do it every day. Did you ever smoke a toke? Even I did, exactly once. When I was first married and living in CT, we used contraceptives, against the law in that time and benighted place.
This is the kind of issue for which the Justice Department is still deporting Nazi war criminals and people who served in units of the Bosnian Serb Army that were involved in atrocities.
The worst is not to disclose and have the issue discovered after the fact - if you do that, you have effectively cut off a line of questioning that was likely to affect the outcome of your application. Being arrested for something like participating in a nonviolent demonstration or having been a political prisoner is generally not going to be an issue if you disclose it and document it properly. I once did a visa application for a guy who had been arrested for attempting to escape East Germany during the Cold War, and it wasn’t an issue at all.
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal