USCIS Proposes to Raise Fees on I-129, I-140, I-90 and Other Applications by an Average of 21 percent This Summer

US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) proposed earlier this month to raise certain fees for petitions and applications, and is currently accepting comments for the required sixty-day comment period. USCIS conducts biennial fee reviews, and the latest review indicated that a twenty-one percent average fee increase is necessary to recover operating costs and to maintain “adequate service.” As the money obtained from USCIS filing fees accounted for ninety-four percent of the USCIS budget last fiscal year with the remaining funding coming from other fee accounts and a small Congressional appropriation fund, USCIS estimates a shortfall of $560 million if fees are not raised.

USCIS has “authority to set its IEFA fees at a level that recovers the full cost of providing adjudication and naturalization services. This includes the cost of providing services to asylum applicants or other immigrants without charge and any additional costs associated with the administration of the fees collected.” USCIS last adjusted its fees in November 2010. Some notable fee increases include:

I-129

Currently set at $325, USCIS is proposing to raise the fee for this form, used for such common non-immigrant visa petitions as H-1Bs, L-1s, and O-1s, among others, by over one hundred dollars to $460.

I-140

USCIS wants to raise the fee for this immigrant petition from $580 to $700.

I-90

This application to replace the permanent resident (Green Card) card will go from $365 to $455.

N-400

USCIS proposes to establish a three-level fee tier for this Application for Naturalization, which is very popular these days as people prepare for voting in the upcoming election. First, USCIS wants to increase the standard fee from $595 to $640. Second, DHS would "charge no fee to an applicant who meets the requirements of sections 328 or 329 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA) with respect to military service and applicants with approved fee waivers." Third, USCIS would charge a reduced fee of $320 for "applicants with family income greater than 150 percent and not more than 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines."

Form I-924A for EB-5 Investor Visa

Rather than a fee increase, USCIS wants to establish a new fee of $3,035 to recover the full cost of processing this form. While approved EB-5 Regional Centers are required to file Form I-924A annually, there is currently no filing fee and as a result, USCIS does not fully recover the processing costs associated with such filings.

What Will Customers Get in Return for These Fee Increases?

The last time USCIS raised fees, they committed to certain goals and performance improvements toward “increasing accountability, providing better customer service, and increasing efficiency.” USCIS claims some improvements since that time but acknowledges that the “agency has experienced elevated processing times” which have led to backlogs; however, they believe that the fee increases this year would increase “resources to fund the personnel needed to improve case processing, reduce backlogs, and achieve processing times that are in line with the commitments in the FY 2007 Fee Rule, which USCIS is still committed to achieving.”  

"When USCIS increases filing fees, our hope is that they will use the increased revenue to improve efficiency and reduce processing times," Justin Storch with the Council for Global Immigration tells the Latin Post, reflecting sentiments shared by many immigration practitioners. Public comments for the fees increase are scheduled to close July 5.

BuzzFeed: “Welcome to America — Now Spy on Your Friends”

The FBI has been pressuring Muslim immigrants who face long delays when applying for permanent residency and US citizenship to become informants in order to expedite their cases, a BuzzFeed News investigation alleges.

The investigation, based on government and court documents, official complaints, interviews with immigrants, immigration and civil rights lawyers, and former special agents, finds that pressuring Muslim applicants to become informants in order to have their cases expedited—or, conversely, threatening to deport them if they do not comply—violates the FBI’s own rules regarding informants. These rules are detailed in the “Attorney General’s Guidelines Regarding the Use of FBI Confidential Human Sources” and forbid FBI agents from making any promises or commitments regarding the “alien status of any person or the right of any person to enter or remain in the United States.”   

Moreover, according to these guidelines, agents must explicitly warn potential informants that the FBI cannot assist with their immigration status in any way. BuzzFeed finds the opposite has happened:

Mandated to enforce the law, the bureau has assumed a powerful but unacknowledged role in a very different realm: decisions about the legal status of immigrants — in particular, Muslim immigrants. First the immigration agency ties up their green card applications for years, even a decade, without explanation, then FBI agents approach the applicants with a loaded offer: Want to get your papers? Start reporting to us about people you know.

BuzzFeed shares the story of one Pakistani software programmer named A.M. (he did not want his name used), who had spent seven years attempting to obtain a Green Card. After a series of interviews, three encounters with the FBI, and unexplained bureaucratic delays, with his work visa shortly expiring and no apparent end in site, he decided to file suit against the Department of Homeland Security, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the FBI.  Afterwards at another meeting with the FBI he was asked to write down names of people he thought were terrorists. When he replied that he didn’t know any terrorists nor was he aware of any suspicious activity, he reported to BuzzFeed that one of the agents told him: “We know about your immigration problems…And we can help you with that.” The catch: he had to make secret reports on his community, friends, and family.

He refused, and shortly thereafter immigration authorities revoked A.M.’s existing work visa and FBI agents turned up unannounced at his home and workplace. Soon A.M. and his family sold their possessions and left the US, where he had lived for seventeen years. 

The goal for the FBI, BuzzFeed reports, is to take advantage of many immigrants’ desperation no matter how useful their supposed “terrorist” contacts would be or if they even have any reliable intelligence about terrorism. This wide-scale approach to intelligence gathering is not even effective according to Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a national security expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. He told BuzzFeed. “All of this investigative effort is against people who are not suspected,” he said, of “terrorism or any other criminal activity.” He added: “This becomes an obstacle to real security.”

Many delays for Muslim immigrants begin with the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP), a once secret USCIS program designed to identify security risks among applicants for visas, asylum, Green Cards, and naturalization. Established in 2008, CARRP targets a wide range of applicants, including not only suspected or known terrorists, but also for applicants based on a range of criteria, including geographical factors, knowledge of someone who is under surveillance, whether any money transfers have been made abroad, having worked for a foreign government, or even certain foreign language skills.

With CARRP, critics contend, the FBI can easily influence the immigration process. Indeed a 2013 report by the ACLU found that immigration authorities “are instructed to follow FBI direction as to whether to deny, approve, or hold in abeyance (potentially indefinitely) an application for an immigration benefit.”

Christopher Bentley, a USCIS spokesperson, told BuzzFeed that each applicant’s file is reviewed and decided by immigration officials alone (not law enforcement) on a “case-by-case” basis. The FBI’s National Press Office said they couldn’t comment to BuzzFeed on the specific strategies and tactics used to recruit informants.

While many have criticized the FBI’s use of informants within Muslim communities, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI believed recruiting informants within the Muslim community was crucial to preventing future terrorist attacks. The Heritage Foundation details at least eighty-one potential terrorist attacks they say have been thwarted since 9/11 and notes that the use of informants was key to preventing many of the attacks. The authors stated: “Both government outreach efforts and the vigilance of Muslim communities against terrorism have proven vital in protecting the US” while noting that “more must be done to enhance mutual trust and partnerships between government, intelligence, and law enforcement and Muslim communities.” And after the recent San Bernardino terror attacks, Edward Gernat, a supervisory special agent for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, explaining how the FBI operates in general, told the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Our No. 1 goal is to prevent acts of terrorism…We will use any law enforcement tool legally available to us to prevent an act.”

Washington Post: “A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online”

After a decade and $1 billion, a project to digitize US immigration forms and the application process by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) has resulted in only one electronic form. The digitization project was originally supposed to cost $500 million and be completed in 2013. The total cost is now estimated at $3.1 billion and isn’t scheduled to be completed for another four years.

What Went Wrong?

The digitization was mismanaged from the beginning, records and interviews show. Notably, officials did not “complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.” Although in 2012, officials of DHS and USCIS were well aware the project had hundreds of software defects, the agency nevertheless chose to begin the rollout, in part reportedly because of pressure from Obama administration officials who thought the project was vital as part of the proposed comprehensive immigration reform.

In the end, only three of USCIS’s forms out of nearly a hundred were digitized and available on the electronic immigration system known as ELIS, a homage to the iconic island that housed the first federal immigration processing center. Two of these forms were consequently taken offline after the software and hardware had to be discarded. One of the digitized forms, Form I-526, Petition by Alien Entrepreneur, for EB-5 immigrant investors, was only reportedly used by eighty applicants, DHS officials said, and was met with many complaints. More than 10,000 other immigrant investor applicants opted for paper-based applications.

The sole form that is now available for electronic filing is the I-90, which can be filed to renew or replace Green Cards (i.e. permanent resident cards). According to a June report from the USCIS ombudsman, however, in nearly 200 I-90 cases filed through the electronic system, applicants did not receive their cards or had to wait up to a year, despite multiple requests.  

“You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency,’’ Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency, said in the Washington Post. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.’’

A Fresh Start

At one point, 500 IBM engineers were working on the project with IBM initially using an outdated programming approach. While DHS officials acknowledge the setbacks they say they are on their way to automating the immigration service, which processes about 8 million applications per year. 

“In 2012, we made some hard decisions to turn the Transformation Program around using the latest industry best practices and approaches, instead of simply scratching it and starting over,’’ Shin Inouye, a spokesman for USCIS, told the Washington Post. “We took a fresh start—a fix that required an overhaul of the development process—from contracting to development methodology to technology.”

“Since making these changes, we have been able to develop and deploy a new system that is able to process about 1.2 million benefit requests out of USCIS’s total annual work volume,” Inouye added. “Our goals remain to improve operations, increase efficiency, and prepare for any changes to our immigration laws. Based on our recent progress, we are confident we are moving in the right direction.”

National Security

Apart from lost and misplaced paper applications, many advocate switching to electronic versions of forms to assist in national security. While DHS officials said “they are confident that the current paper-based system is not putting the nation at risk,” Palma Yanni, a D.C. immigration lawyer and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), is not so sure. She said in the Washington Post: “If there are some bad apples in there who should not get a green card, who are terrorists who want to do us harm, how on earth are they going to find these people if they’re sending mountains of paper immigration files all over the United States?’’