This year has seen a flood of assaults on immigration laws, with the twin goals of slowing down the granting of immigration benefits as well as accelerating the rate of deportation. These goals have been accomplished not with new immigration laws passed by congress or by the President’s much publicized executive actions, but by policy changes quietly implemented at the department level. In the following blog series,we will discuss these dramatic changes taking place with minimal fanfare.
On August 28, 2017, the USCIS announced a new policy to expand in-person interview for all applicants for Permanent Residence, and relatives of asylees/refugees. It also announced its intention to expand the interviews beyond these categories to include applicants for other immigration benefits. While the administration justifies this by stating that it wants to verify the information submitted by applicants as part of the promised “extreme vetting”, it is clear that the goal is really to slow down the immigration process. The interview of applicants for permanent residence was a program that USCIS instituted and then abandoned decades ago because it determined that there was very limited benefit to these interviews, as these applicants typically have already gone through multiple levels of screenings before their Permanent Residency applications are adjudicated.
The local officers tasked with conducting interviews typically do not have training on adjudicating these types of applications. Moreover, this mandate did not come with additional resources to hire new officers to work on these cases. So, we have a situation where tens of thousands of cases will be added to the local offices, with no additional officers to administer interviews. Using 2015 numbers, this will potentially affect about 168,000 applications. The net effect will be that these cases that usually take years to adjudicate will take even longer. At the same time the adjudication of other types of cases by local offices will also be delayed as officers add this new workload to their existing case assignments.
In another recent development, on October 23, 2017, the USCIS announced yet another policy that reversed a long-held policy on how to adjudicate renewal applications where the employer, employee and job categories have not changed. Under the old policy, immigration adjudicators were allowed to grant deference to USCIS prior adjudications where there has not been any change in circumstances. This is because in initial applications, both employer and employee have to demonstrate their eligibility for the immigration benefits sought. Under this new policy, effective immediately, even in renewal or extension applications, the parties have to prove everything afresh. While this may not be an insurmountable burden, the question is: to what purpose? Is there any element of efficiency or effectiveness to this requirement? Or is the goal simply to create additional burdens on immigrants and employers of immigrants?
We expect this trend to continue. The new guardians of our immigration system have long vowed to revamp the system to suite their anti-immigrant goals. Now, they have free reign to do just that.