Over 100,000 green cards and work permits that should have already been printed and sent to their recipients by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) remain unprinted and unsent to their recipients because the broke agency can’t print them. No, really: “The administration claims that its reduction in printing capacity is due to a USCIS budget shortfall that it has blamed on a reduction in fee revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Immigration Impact said.
Immigration Impact said that USCIS claimed it would print documents in-house after ending a contract with an outside vendor. “Of the two facilities where these credentials were printed, one, in Corbin, Ky., shut down production three weeks ago,” The Washington Post said this month. “The other facility, in Lee’s Summit, Mo., appears to be operating at reduced capacity.”
If USCIS was really going to print these hugely important documents in-house without disruption, fine, but USCIS is also broke and set to furlough more than 13,000 of its 20,000 workers in exactly two weeks if there’s no Congressional intervention soon. “However, that isn’t the whole story,” Immigration Impact noted.
The report said that “[w]hile COVID-19 has had a significant impact across our immigration system, USCIS has been on a path to financial ruin for years due largely to its own fiscal mismanagement” and anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration. The agency could potentially be bringing in massive revenue by processing new applications from young immigrants who could now be eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections following the Supreme Court’s decision last month, but the Trump administration is now in open defiance of the court and has so far refused to reopen the program.
“The agency’s only public acknowledgment of the Court’s ruling, which was delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, was to question its legitimacy,” The American Prospect noted. So, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants are getting fucked over by a lawless and corrupt administration in addition to the tens of thousands of others who also followed the rules in applying for their green cards and work permits.
“The people impacted by these printing delays have already had their petitions and applications approved by USCIS,” Immigration Impact noted. “They have paid the often-exorbitant filing fees, completed the necessary paperwork, and gone through extensive background checks. Despite this, the agency says it ‘cannot speculate on future projections of processing times.’
“This leaves hundreds of thousands of people without the documents needed to support themselves,” the report continued. “These documents are important in normal times—but are even more critical during a worldwide pandemic.” Just imagine knowing the documents you worked so hard to gain are just out of reach because the government isn’t getting its shit together, on purpose.
