What's in a name? Well, plenty, it seems, for Ahmed Mohamed Warsame, a Somali refugee who came to this country in 1995, graduated from Roseville Area High School in 1999, and wanted, desperately, to become a U.S. citizen. Warsame has the unfortunate coincidence of having a name similar to that of a terror suspect, Mohamed Warsame, who has been locked up since he crossed into the United States from Canada. It took two years of phone calls, waiting, fingerprints, more waiting, letters from lawyers and U.S. senators and more waiting. And, still, Warsame's efforts for citizenship were stalled.
That is, until a Bloomington attorney who works out of her home and had never handled an immigration case before sued federal officials in May. She pointed out that not only did authorities have fingerprints to tell the difference between the unrelated men, but also that the terror suspect has been in jail for five years.
Now, Ahmed Warsame, 30, is a citizen.
And federal officials, while not acknowledging that they had the two Warsames confused, admit that checking his name and fingerprints through the FBI could have been the reason for the long delay.
"There were nearly 30,000 naturalization cases submitted to the FBI before May of 2006 that were most likely recently resolved," said Marilu Cabrera of the Chicago office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). "We had a backlog."
She added: "This is one of the reasons we see, a similar name to someone on a terrorist watch list."
Said Lisa Miller, Ahmed Warsame's attorney: "I think what happened to Ahmed is simply that he applied for citizenship at a time when there were a lot of security concerns."
'I don't know him'