Immigrants Denied

Immigrants Denied Citizenship for Working in the Legal Marijuana Industry

Oswaldo Barrientos has lived as a legal immigrant in Denver, Colorado for almost his entire life. Now 30, he and his mother immigrated to the United States from El Salvador when he was a year old. But in his recent interview with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), he was denied American citizenship—simply because he works in the legal marijuana industry.

Barrientos’ situation exposes the inherent conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. Some immigrants are now getting trapped in the crosshairs. Medical marijuana has been legal in Colorado for almost two decades. 33 other states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, also legalized marijuana.

But immigration officials are choosing to ignore state laws. They instead opted to only focus on federal laws, which have not decriminalized marijuana.

As a result, life-long U.S. residents like Barrientos can be denied American citizenship for lacking “good moral character,” as his USCIS denial letter described it.

This means Barrientos—a hardworking, tax-paying, legal U.S. resident who has no criminal background—is stuck in limbo. His attorney warned him that he can’t even travel abroad. There is now a real risk he’d get detained by airport authorities.

Barrientos says he started working at the dispensary after his mother received a stage 3 skin cancer diagnosis in 2014.