Keeping in line with its commitment to increase efficiency, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) announced changes to improve and simplify how the agency communicates case processing time data to the public. Effective immediately, users can now “find the processing time information for their particular type of case, rather than seeing an aggregate of all related case types.”
Read moreUSCIS Cancels Furlough of Nearly 70% of Workforce
US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) this week announced that the agency will cancel an administrative furlough of more than 13,000 employees that was scheduled to begin August 30. In a statement, USCIS said that they expect to be able to maintain operations through the end of fiscal year 2020 (on September 30), although Joseph Edlow, USCIS Deputy Director for Policy, noted that “averting this furlough comes at a severe operational cost that will increase backlogs and wait times across the board, with no guarantee we can avoid future furloughs.” He added: “A return to normal operating procedures requires congressional intervention to sustain the agency through fiscal year 2021.”
Read moreForbes: “Congress Asks USCIS To Explain Immigration Delays And Denials.”
Congress raised concerns about the rising delays and unjustified denials of various visa types at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), during a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on July 16, 2019. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, specifically highlighted inefficiencies regarding changes in processing, noting their impact on students experiencing significant delays for Optical Practical Training (OPT).
Read moreThink Immigration: “USCIS Acknowledges That Its Own Policies Compound Case Processing Delays.”
USCIS’s own policies are contributing in part to the dramatic slowdown of case processing times that affect millions of individuals, families, and businesses throughout the country, Jason Boyd, policy counsel with the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) Government Relations department, writes in Think Immigration. Earlier this year in February, eighty-six members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) that demanded accountability for the agency’s increasingly lengthy processing delays.
Read moreNational Law Review: “Slow Immigration Processing Times Draw Criticism and Questions.”
Processing times for immigration cases have dramatically increased in the last few years to “crisis levels under the Trump Administration,” according to an American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) policy brief. These delays in some cases have caused gaps in work authorization and loss of employment, and the same AILA brief notes that the “ballooning delays leave families—including families with US citizen spouses and children—in financial distress, expose protection-seekers to potential harm by bad actors, and threaten the viability of American companies facing workforce gaps.”
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