A program designed to help the Army fill critical billets by providing a streamlined path to citizenship has been stopped cold by the kind of paperwork problems it was designed to circumvent.

The Military Accessions Vital to National Interest, or MAVNI, program allows up to 1,500 noncitizens — refugees, those holding student visas and members of other qualifying groups — to join the military providing they demonstrate proficiency in languages deemed essential by the Defense Department or in medical fields "wherein the Service has a critical shortfall," according to a DoD fact sheet. In place in various forms since 2009, the program expanded in September to include those under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals process, covering many young adults who entered the country without documentation before their 16th birthday.

Since then, the Army side of the program, which takes the wide majority of the recruits, has been on hold.

"Procedures to enlist DACAs require additional coordination (not limited to security screening), which is ongoing at this time," Army spokesman Wayne Hall said via email in early December, adding that he anticipated the program would re-open "in the near future."

The retired officer behind the program took issue with that timeline, given the work required to sort out the DACA expansion. And non-DACA applicants already in the pipeline have signed petitions, enlisted help from lawmakers and watched from the sidelines, some nearing the end of the eligibility window and eyeing other, more complicated ways to remain in their adopted homeland.

While they wait, high-need jobs may go empty, including medical positions that would be all but impossible for DACA program members to fill.

Creation and dysfunction

Retired Lt. Col. Margaret Stock, who built and implemented the MAVNI program while in uniform late last decade, said the addition of the DACA applicants will force a total overhaul, as original screening systems were created to weed out exactly the applicants who'll now be part of the pool.

"It was set up for people who are legally in the country, and had been legal their whole history," she said. "They have to go back and redo all the security screenings, train recruiters all over again … it's one of these things where people want magic to happen, and bureaucracy doesn't work that way."

Stock, who now practices immigration and other types of law in Alaska, said the success of the initial program stemmed from the "completely dysfunctional" immigration system, which buried applicants in paperwork and could take more than a decade to navigate. Now, MAVNI applicants must wait for the Army's system of checks and screenings to adjust, which will involve more than just training for DoD employees and uniformed personnel.

The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, "is set up to come back with a 'do not enlist' answer from a DACA [applicant]," Stock said. "The office … will tell you they're not eligible. They're going to have to train that office again."

These retraining measures won't address other issues raised by Stock:

  • While the applicant pool has expanded, the quota remains at 1,500, and many qualified non-DACA individuals already have their place in line. Stock compared it to "musical chairs with more people in the room" and questioned whether promises made to the DACA community about the program accurately reflected the small amount of applicants – about a dozen, she told ThinkProgress.org – would be accepted.
  • Regardless of test scores, DACA program applicants won't qualify for some of the open medical billets because U.S. medical schools have only just begun accepting students in that immigration status.

Wait and see

A recent Army news release reminded readers that despite what one might expect if judging by news coverage, malaria remains a much larger health risk to soldiers in Liberia than Ebola.

Fighting malaria means fighting insects that spread the disease. Angel Aceves, in her fourth and final year of a doctoral program in entomology at Virginia Tech, hoped to join the Army research in such efforts through the MAVNI program.

"At first, I found out about [MAVNI] through the language program," said Aceves, a native of the Philippines who speaks two of the program's critical languages. "But there are certain professions that are related to the medical field [covered by the program] and one of the professions that was listed was entomology. I said, 'OK, why not?' "

The 28-year-old came to America in 2008 to study for her master's at the University of Hawaii. She began the MAVNI process in September, filling out online forms and speaking with recruiters in person, before the delay took hold.

"It's scary," she said. "I'm disappointed, really, knowing how important it is to the Army. … With visa and age limits, there are applicants that are very, very scared."

Vaneet Goyal holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from North Carolina State University and wants to join the Army to serve in "the best military in the world." He began the MAVNI process in August, he said, "and before I could enlist, the program was on hold. Physical is cleared, all the tests are cleared – and it's not just me, there are hundreds of us."

A petition started by Goyal on the White House website asking Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to restart the program had more than 725 signatures before it aged off the site, Goyal said. A similar petition filed to Change.org had 136 signatures as of Monday. He has also created a website with information about the program and the petition.

"Everyone was confused. We didn't have any clue what's going on," said Goyal, who was raised in India and now works in Georgia. "I wanted to do something constructive."

By the numbers

About 2,900 people have signed up to serve via the MAVNI program, said Defense Department spokesman Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, confirming figures he provided to Politico for an October piece on the program. The extension approved in September that included the DACA expansion will keep the program running through September 2016.

Christensen referred all questions on MAVNI delays to the individual services, and said because DoD doesn't know how many people will apply for the program, it does not "have an estimate of how many people this will potentially impact."

Stock, the retired Army officer behind the program's implementation, didn't have exact figures either, but called it "incredibly popular."

"I could be a millionaire tomorrow if I knew when it was going to open up," she said.

Goyal and fellow applicants remain in waiting for the million-dollar question to be answered.

"They don't know what to do next in their life," he said of those in limbo. "This was my set path. We have no clue what we are going to do next."

About Kevin Lilley

Kevin Lilley is the features editor of Military Times.

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