Obama Is Still President In Welcome Letter Sent To New U.S. Citizens

Nina Golgowski
Updated
Donald Trump may be in the White House but in some welcome letters, it’s still Barack Obama who’s commander in chief.

Donald Trump may be in the White House but in some welcome letters, it’s still Barack Obama who’s commander in chief.

An administrative gaffe led to the distribution of some 200 congratulatory letters that identify Obama as the U.S. president to newly minted citizens, The Hill reported.

Aisha Sultan, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, shared a photo of her British-born husband’s letter on Twitter Friday, raising attention to the error that was liked more than 169,000 times.

“We embrace you as a new citizen of our land, and we welcome you to the American family,” read the letter, signed by Trump’s predecessor.

Sultan wasn’t the only one finding amusement with the gaffe, as fellow Twitter users responded with an assortment of playful GIFs and stories about their own family’s experiences while becoming U.S. citizens.

The welcome letters are typically produced by the new administration and then distributed to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is a division of the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS press secretary Gillian Christensen told The Hill.

Christensen called the release of the Obama administration’s letters an oversight that resulted in about 200 of the dated letters being distributed.

Maria Elena Upson, another USCIS spokeswoman, told Arizona Central last month that the agency had yet to receive a welcome letter and video message from Trump, but that it’s not unusual for new administrations to take several months to accomplish that task. Until that happens, she said that new citizens don’t receive either a congratulatory letter or video message.

One twitter user, commenting on Sultan’s photo, wrote that during her husband’s citizenship ceremony in March, they accidentally started to play Obama’s congratulatory video.

“Everyone cheered!” she wrote.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.