USCIS says that they are broke!

Wanted to tell you the latest from the powers that be at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

According to this piece in The New York Times, the agency is out of money!

They say that they could run out of money by this summer due to a steep decrease in applications for green cards, citizenship and other applications.

USCIS is self-funded by the high filing fees that they keep raising and raising.

Revenues are down by 60 percent.

A USCIS spokesperson said, “[d]ue to the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S.C.I.S. has seen a dramatic decrease in revenue.” 

The agency is asking for a $1.2 billion cash infusion from Congress.

USCIS also plans to add an emergency 10% surcharge on applications moving forward.

If you are thinking of filing a new application with USCIS, you should probably do it right away before these new fees go into effect.

There is a lot to impact here.

First, the Trump Administration has shifted much of the money in USCIS's budget away from the actually processing of cases and directed the funds to enforcement and removal of immigrants.

This is a huge reason why they don't have enough resources.

In addition, the President's harsh rhetoric and increase in government bureaucracy and delay at the agency has also kept many eligible people from applying for benefits.

Every case takes much longer than it used to.

For instance, it used to take two or three months for the spouses of US citizens to change their status from conditional permanent resident to full legal resident.

Now it takes 18-24 months.

Ridiculous.

The agency also now requires interviews for virtually every major type of immigration case, a marked change from decades of agency practice.

Basically, the chickens have come home to roost.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

We will monitor the situation and keep you posted

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/us/immigration-agency-uscis-budget.html