United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) facing extreme processing delays amid COVID-19 pandemic and temporary office closures
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, temporary office closures, capacity limitations and staff cuts, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been facing extreme immigration processing delays and ever growing backlogs of pending cases.
Particularly troubling is the delays in processing times for employment authorization cards (EADs) – which has caused many foreign nationals to lose their work authorization and prevent U.S. businesses from hiring and retaining foreign talent at a critical time for economic recovery.
“Earlier this year, I had to stop working for the company that is sponsoring my work authorization because my prior card expired (…) and my application had been pending for more than 8 months” says a Peruvian national who works at an engineering firm in Boston and requested anonymity for this story.
EADs are often issued to a wide variety of applicants seeking work authorization – many in vulnerable visa categories. These include, spouses of specific employment-based nonimmigrant visa holders (E1, E2, and certain H-1B visa holders), F1 students who are part of an OPT (Optional Practical Training) program, people who are eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), pending asylum applicants, and anyone waiting to adjudicate status to become a permanent resident.
Foreign nationals waiting for the adjudication of their green cards depend on this document to remain work authorized in the United States. “I am privileged in a way because I don’t have kids, or anything, and I saved money to afford living off my savings for months because I didn’t know how long it was going to take,” the Peruvian national said.
Other foreign nationals have expressed their concerns via social media - calling attention to the several implications that have emerged from the agency’s outside-normal processing times.
The agency's online processing times show the average time it takes them to process a particular form, at a particular service center. Current EAD processing times have dramatically increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Median processing times of EAD applications pending asylum processing rose 318%, from 1.7 months in FY17 to 7.1 months as of March 2022. For pending green card adjudications, the Texas Service Center and the Nebraska Service Center are currently reporting processing times of 11.5 - 13.5 months – compared to 2.8 – 6 months 3 pre pandemic.
Source: AILA analysis of data from the USCIS webpage Historical National Median Processing Time (in Months) for All USCIS Offices for Select Forms By Fiscal Year, https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt.
“Most applicants can file to renew their employment authorization card up to six months before their cards expire but due to the the processing backlogs many applicants don’t get their renewed cards before the current EAD expires,” says immigration attorney, Bailey Anderson.
Anderson explains that in 2019, USCIS started requiring certain EAD applicants to attend an in-person biometrics appointment at an Application Support Center (ASC). But a year later, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person services were suspended. This resulted in a substantial volume of cases awaiting biometrics appointments, and ultimately a backlog of a large number of applications.
In December 2020, Sen. Abigail D. Spanberger submitted a FOIA to USCIS requesting the agency to share its plan to reduce the backlog of EADs and Green Cards. In response to the request, USCIS said that in order to make the best use of the limited number of biometric collection appointments available, where possible, USCIS reuses the Fingerprint Identification Numbers previously collected.
Later in March 2021, the agency announced that it will temporarily suspend the biometrics requirement for certain applicants – a rule expected to be in place until May 17, 2023. A year later, biometrics are still being waived and ASCs have reopened to the public – yet, the total number of cases backlogged at the agency is 4.4 million, 740,569 of those being EAD applications as of September 2021, according to the immigration law firm, Sapochnick Law Firm.
A FOIA request was submitted in February this year asking for the agency’s updated plan to reduce the backlogs, as well as reports, memos or correspondence in the last two years that address this issue. The agency replied saying it “does not find that you have adequately described the records sought [and] needs clarification from you regarding the records you are requesting,” although the FOAI’s language was based on Sen. Spanberger’s FOIA request in 2020.
After providing more details on the request, USCIS updated its estimated completion date to May 23, 2022.
On March 29, it announced three new actions to help reduce backlogs and improve processing times: establishing new processing time goals for applications, expanding premium processing options for certain EAD applications, and automatically extending certain employment authorization documents.
Although Congress has provided $250 million to USCIS to support processing delays, and USCIS plans to increase capacity and expand staffing to achieve these goals by the end of FY 2023, it is uncertain how this would play out as this announcement came out almost three years after the agency started struggling to keep up with normal processing times.
While it is clear that the rise in delays affect time-sensitive applications like EADs, USCIS’ processing issues began long before the pandemic, which further exacerbates the need for better policies to speed processing times, according to a report published by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
In the meantime, immigrants, their families, and U.S. employers will continue to suffer the consequences of the agency’s backlogs.
This story was developed as part of an investigative journalism project examining the 2022 USCIS delays in processing Employment Authorization Documents (EADs), which allow foreign nationals to work and travel outside the United States. I became interested in the issue during the pandemic, when the flaws in the U.S. immigration system became even more evident. As mass layoffs made headlines, I knew this was an especially exhausting time for immigrants who depended on these documents — an added layer of stress on top of an already difficult period. I filed public records requests with USCIS seeking information on its plans , interviewed foreign nationals and immigration attorneys and . The story was reported and written by me, and edited by Mike Beaudet, an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter.
Sources
https://www.aila.org/advo-media/aila-policy-briefs/uscis-processing-delays-2022
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/us-immigration-backlogs-mounting-undermine-biden
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