Despite campaign promises, long-awaited immigration reform did not arrive in 2021. And although the Biden Administration enacted some changes with its internal policies, sadly, the situation for millions of undocumented immigrants remains in limbo. The problem is that there is now a threat to documented immigrants: there is a huge backlog of immigration cases.
The number of pending cases is alarming. This is true with procedures such as work permits or “green cards,” as well as in immigration courts, and with visa and asylum applications.
One year to renew work permits
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) saw an increase in applications for immigration procedures, from 5.7 million at the end of fiscal year 2019 to about 9.5 million in February 2022.
To cite an example, the waiting time to renew certain work permits was approximately three months in 2019. Now, it is between five and a half months and 12 months, according to USCIS.
Work permits are generally valid for two years and then must be renewed. Since 2017, the rule has been that when this document expires, it is automatically extended for 180 days (6 months) once the immigrant makes the renewal request. However, this is not enough time given the delay in issuing these documents.
How can an immigrant who is obeying immigration laws survive if he or she has to wait numerous months to be able to work?
Immigration courts overwhelmed with cases
Immigration courts have more than 1.6 million cases pending, compared to 1.1 million before the pandemic and more than double the number of cases in fiscal year 2018, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute.
Nationwide, immigration courts recorded 86,297 completed cases between October 2021 and January 2022, which set a record. Yet during this same period, they received three times as many new cases: 260,038, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
In North Carolina, there are nearly 61,000 cases pending in Charlotte’s Immigration Court.
During the months of the pandemic in the Trump administration, the average time it took to close an immigration case doubled from 600 days to 1,200 days. As of January 2022, the average completion time for a case in immigration court was 1,206 days.
Pending visas and asylum applications
At the State Department, waits for in-person consular interviews for immigrant visas went from 60,900 in 2019 before the pandemic, to an all-time high of 532,000 last July.
In March of this year alone, embassies and consulates scheduled 32,317 interviews with eligible visa applicants. However, there are 436,700 pending interviews.
As for asylum cases, by the end of December 2021 the backlog of pending applications reached 676,131.
What is causing this delay?
Some of the delays were due to the pandemic. For several months in 2020, government offices closed their doors. But the pandemic exacerbated a bottleneck that had existed for years, caused by indifference in Washington, DC.
These are human beings, not mere statistics. Thousands of immigrants are ending up without work permits, without a document that prevents their deportation, without a visa to reunite them with their loved ones. Families are suffering.
The government must prioritize this issue by raising the salaries of employees who work in these offices, by filling vacancies, and by investing in improvements to the procedures for processing these documents.
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