Contact with people of unknown citizenship

SECURITY CLEARANCE Q&A
1

I have 2 questions about reporting Foreign contact:

  1. Someone I had weekly contact with at a student org in uni in the US grew up in the US. Their family is from a different country from what I can remember, but I don’t actually know their citizenship info (never came up in conversation). The foreign contact section asks for people without US citizenship, so would I also need to list someone who’s potentially a foreign national but I’m unsure of their actual citizenship status? I’ve always assumed people I met in the US are citizens unless I have info that says otherwise.

  2. If the investigation ends up finding someone who’s a foreign national I had contact with through a reference who knows them more than I do, but I didn’t put on the form because to the best of knowledge I didn’t know their citizenship status, would that make them think I was hiding my connection to them? The alternative would be guessing citizenship based on name and listing all whom I’ve had contact with.

I’m asking this because as a uni student, I met a bunch of people at student org meetings. These meetings are weekly or monthly and extracurricular, so I’m pretty sure that counts as continuing social contact, however I only know the citizenship statuses of a few of the people I met/talked with, and the school I went to has a lot of international students/immigrants, so some other people I’ve talked to may also be non US citizens, and as far as I know I’m not supposed to go around asking everyone their citizenship to fill out the SF86?

2

If you dont know their citizenship and they are in the US, then yes its fine to assume they are US citizens and treat it as such for the forms. Also dont ask people if they are us citizens or not just to find out. This has always been what was told for me to do.

1 Like
3

Unless you know a person’s citizenship, it’s ok to assume they are US if you met them in the US. If it comes to light that So and So is not a US citizen, you may be asked about it. If you failed to list them because you did not know their citizenship and did not want to assume they held foreign citizenship, that is what you say. I interviewed many uni students at a school with a huge foreign student population. Most would explain that they belong to such and such and group and do not know the citizenship of each member.

You are correct, you should not be asking anyone about their citizenship in regard to the SF86.