• The New York Legal Assistance Group has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of Russian-speaking refugees and immigrants, some of whom face losing federal benefits unless they're naturalized.

• The Council on American-Islamic Relations' Chicago's Citizenship Delay Project is helping Muslim immigrants individually and also is pursuing a class-action lawsuit.

Bresson said there are a number of reasons why some names can take more than six months to process, such as records that are several years old or that were submitted by a small-town police department.

"It's quite an undertaking to then go back and resolve the reason why that record was in there," he said. "Whether or not it's something we should be concerned with."

He added that the FBI received 2 million names when the list was created in December 2002.

"We've been processing them in huge volumes ever since," he said. "Last year we processed more than 3.7 million requests, and 85 percent of the time we complete those having no records within 72 hours.

"The bottom line is, there is a huge volume of requests we receive," he said. "There is a backlog, and a very small percentage of those cases that takes some amount of time to complete."

But for Hassan and about a half-dozen other Kurdish men gathered outside the Khadeeja Mosque in West Valley City, the wait doesn't make sense.

One man, who asked not to be identified, questioned why his mentally disabled sister is on the security list. Another, Sindy Soud, has been waiting more than two years since his February 2004 citizenship interview to find out if he can become a U.S. citizen.

"You don't feel good if you are waiting for something," he said. "We want to be citizens for elections, we want to be a different person, part of the United States."

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E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com