Will Racke of the Daily Caller details a disturbing report linked to identity fraud and its role in helping illegal immigrants secure citizenship.

A new government office created to investigate bogus naturalization applications estimates there are at least 3,000 cases of aliens who used false identities to obtain U.S. citizenship, federal officials told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The office, housed inside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has identified the potential fraud cases as a part of its ongoing review of more than 300,000 fingerprint records uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database beginning in 2014.

Based on the review to date, officials could uncover more than 3,000 instances where an ineligible alien assumed another identity and used it to become a U.S. citizen, USCIS associate director for field operations Daniel Renaud told TheDCNF Tuesday in an interview.

The targeted review stems from a 2016 DHS inspector general report that found roughly 315,000 old fingerprint records for people who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a DHS database of immigrants’ identities. As immigration authorities enrolled the paper records into the DHS system, they discovered hundreds of cases where an alien with an order of removal under one name had been naturalized under another identity.