A green card holder from Cairo called the Immigration Answer Show with what sounded like a routine question: he becomes eligible to naturalize in October and wanted to know what documents to bring. He never got to the document list.
The history mattered more. He came to the United States as a visitor at the end of 2015 and filed for asylum two months later, based on two violent attacks he suffered in Egypt for being gay. The case sat without an interview for years. In 2020 he met his U.S. citizen husband, married, and got a marriage-based green card in late 2023. He then withdrew the asylum case and started flying back to Egypt. He made several trips, and on one of them his husband came along.
Founding attorney Jim Hacking walked him through how a naturalization officer would read that file, playing the officer’s part himself.
mic What the Attorney Says
“And I pull up your asylum case. Tell me all the terrible things you said about Egypt and how it wasn’t safe for you to be there.”
The caller had sworn in his Form I-589 that returning to Egypt meant jail or worse. Then he returned, voluntarily, three times.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You swore under oath that if you go back to Egypt, you’re going to get tortured or thrown in jail or beaten up for being gay. … you went back to the country that you swore you needed asylum from. That you swore it was deadly for you to go back to not once, not twice, but three times. And at least one time you brought your husband with you.”
Withdrawing the asylum case did not erase it. The sworn statements stay in the A-file, and naturalization is where the government reads the whole A-file again. If the officer concludes the asylum claim was false, that is a good moral character problem under 8 U.S.C. § 1427. If the officer concludes the claim was true, the return trips look reckless and invite questions about every other sworn statement in the file. Either way, filing the N-400 hands the government a reason to reopen everything. That is the same file-wide re-review that is now flagging old cases for denaturalization.
mic What the Attorney Says
“If you were a citizen right now, I’d be telling you I’m worried they’re going to take away your citizenship.”
He was not exaggerating. 8 U.S.C. § 1451 lets the government strip citizenship that was illegally procured or procured by concealment of a material fact, and travel records are among the easiest evidence for it to pull.
Hacking’s advice was blunt: keep the ten-year green card, skip the N-400, and stop the trips.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You shouldn’t apply for citizenship. And if you were to apply for citizenship, you’d have to get that file before you do. But you should not apply for citizenship.”
The one affirmative step he did recommend: get a complete copy of the asylum file, both from the attorney who filed it and through a FOIA request to USCIS, so any future filing starts from what the government actually has rather than memory. The caller’s situation echoes what happens when an asylum case is withdrawn but its paper trail lives on, and it is the flip side of the pressure some applicants face to file asylum claims they never wanted.
Sources
- 8 U.S.C. § 1158 — Asylum (Cornell LII) open_in_new
- 8 U.S.C. § 1427 — Requirements of Naturalization (Cornell LII) open_in_new
- 8 U.S.C. § 1451 — Revocation of Naturalization (Cornell LII) open_in_new
- USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 12, Part F — Good Moral Character open_in_new
- USCIS — Request Records Through FOIA or Privacy Act open_in_new
- Immigration Answer Show — live broadcast (July 1, 2026) open_in_new