Welcome to this week's live attorney chat. My name is Attorney Desiree Koger-Gustafson
with Immigration for Couples. If you are new to our firm or our Facebook page,
we regularly do these live weekly chats to address issues that have come up in the
USCIS or immigration world or common themes that we are hearing during consultations so
if you think that this might be helpful to someone you know if conversations you've had
with family and friends feel free to like and share our page or this broadcast and hopefully
they can get some assistance as well if you are joining us live and I know I'm coming on here
just a bit early today feel free to put any questions or comments in the comment feature
I will try to address those if I can get to them here or see them while I am talking about today's
subject also if you are listening to this on replay comment hashtag replay you can also put
questions in there after the fact we do review them if it's something that we can respond to
appropriately in a brief comment we will otherwise we'll come back on and do another live video based
on whatever that question might have been if it's something more in depth or something that
somebody else might also be experiencing. Today, I would like to talk about the backlog with USCIS.
Recently, USCIS issued its progress report for 2022 and they've discussed the issue of backlogs.
Obviously, there are many factors that went into why we have such a backlog and the time frames
that we see with USCIS currently they have to do with COVID, global conditions such as Ukraine and
even Afghanistan still dealing with all of those things. If you may remember there was a hiring
freeze for almost a year, May of 2020 to March of 2021. USCIS was not able to replace people
that they lost and they lost a considerable amount per this report in 2019 and 2020
they were also forced to close in person due to COVID during that time frame so that just created
a backlog. One of the things that they mentioned in this report is that they were able to stop the
growth of that backlog. They feel they are making significant progress and we are seeing progress in
a lot of different areas so let's talk about the wins first. They talk about really focusing on
naturalization over this past year. They had one million people naturalized in 2022. This was up
62 percent, that's a drastic increase. They also had made a lot of improvements to employment-based
visas. They issued all that were given out. Most visas have a cap or a number of visas that
can be issued. They issued all of those for the employment-based visas. They definitely had made
efforts in those work visas that are dealing with stem, people who have come here on a work visa,
getting EADs automatically for their spouses just automatic extensions we've seen a lot of
those. those have been very helpful if and when they do come through for visas that are taking
so such a long time to process and we can't get there their approval soon enough and that issued
employment authorization or EAD basically expires before they are able to get that petition approved
so they've done a lot of that. they've reformed the EBC process.
They've expedited some health care workers, child care types of applications and of course they've
increased some premium processing so a lot on the employment-related front and they tout,
throughout all of these wins, the support from Congress because their budget is authorized by
Congress and so they need their support in order to have the funds to be able to increase staffing
and all of those things to be appropriated enough money to do their job.
Where we still see them have work to do is going to be on that humanitarian front, asylums,
refugees, humanitarian parole. We saw a lot of filings, like 45,000 filings somewhere around
there for Afghanistan most of those were not even processed and many of those were denied so there's
lots of work to be done on that humanitarian front. They did increase TPS. They added Ethiopia
and some other renewals and reauthorizations so that was good. Obviously, family-based which
is majority of our clientele still have some work to do on on the backlogs there and we're
seeing a lot of people that did petition during that time that are still kind of stalled out
because they came in that time period where everything was going on a shelf and they're now in
the consular phase and really just kind of stuck so we're working with clients to try to get those
unstuck, get them to consulates that will process and get them an interview and get thei spouse or
their family member here EAD renewals obviously we still have some work to do on those. For 2023,
they definitely put in that progress report some goals or things they want to work on.
They want to simplify that work authorization process,
adjustment of status, and naturalizations all of those will impact our work if they're
able to do that. They're going to continue to focus on hiring so all of those things should
make these fluid processing times and wait times and backlog push through the process.
It's definitely important for our clients, if you are watching here share this widely. It's
important for you to contact your congressional representative whether that's your senator,
your house representative and let them know how the wait lines and the backlogs are impacting
your life and your ability to be with your spouse. Most of the time people don't pick
up the phone to call those agencies. They don't think to submit a request online. Most of these
representatives have easy ways to contact them and the more frequently they hear something,
the more overarching need they are going to feel is out there for their constituents and
then a pressure then to to act in congress so just wanted to to make sure everybody was
aware that all of those things are appropriated by Congress and just to make sure that you're
contacting your representatives and letting them know even if it's not on your case specifically
like the time frame just isn't right for you to start initiating an actual inquiry with them.
Just letting them know how all of that backlog is impacting you as a US citizen so maybe we
can make some headway that way. I hope this has been helpful obviously you can find a lot more
resources on immigration for couples.com if you click on our resources tab we have tons of videos
out there to try to help you guys navigate or understand the immigration process again my
name is attorney Desiree Koger-Gustafson and I will see you next week have a great day [Music]