When incoming director L. Francis Cissna struck “nation of immigrants” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) mission statement, he meant it. Under newly announced policy, officials now plan to use mistakes and missing information from visa and green card applications against immigrants and deny their applications, which could not only add massive legal fees to an already expensive process, but leave others vulnerable to deportation.
“Previously, officers were required by an Obama-era policy to send notices, giving applicants a chance to correct such problems instead of closing the process,” ProPublica reports. “Officers can still choose to do so, but they can also opt to skip that step if the application is deemed frivolous.” This will be a problem, to say the least, when Cissna himself has earned the support of anti-immigrant groups, and last month sat down with “a hate group that exists solely to vilify immigrants.”
So exactly what kind of mistakes may be used against applicants? Lawyers who spoke to ProPublica “cited technicalities: One application was not accepted because the seventh page, usually left blank, was not attached. Another was rejected because it did not have a table of contents and exhibit numbers, even though it had other forms of organization.” Yes, applications have their rules that need to be followed, “but it seems like they are just making every single submission difficult,” said immigration attorney Pierre Bonnefil. Others have called it an “invisible wall.”
For many, the worry could be that their visas will expire as they’re fighting to correct these errors, and a lapse in permission could mean they could be deported. They have good reason to worry—a new lawsuit alleged USCIS and ICE have collaborated to have immigrants who have shown up for green card appointments arrested, and there’s no way to guarantee that applicants who have had their forms rejected because of this new policy won’t also be on ICE’s radar in this same manner.
“People who are here legally, doing everything through proper channels, now feel as unsettled and unwelcome and uncertain about the future as people who don’t have documents,” said Sandra Feist, another immigration attorney. It’s intentional. The administration hates legal immigration too—unless, of course, you’re the “right” kind of immigrant.