President Donald Trump’s hatred for Indian immigrants was well known. His advisor Stephen Miller tried to harass Indian immigrant through various legal and illegal tricks. Brazen behavior by Trump admin had reached epic proportions when he illegally appoint USCIS director who then completely broke the organization.
USCIS which is funded by fees and not by American taxpayers became so inefficient under Trump that it started taking more than a year to process forms that should have taken less than a month. To add to this delay Trump admin forced married applicants file separately and added biometric collection as a step despite the fact that Department of State does collect biometric data for all applicants.
This was part of the reason Indian immigrants in USA overwhelmingly supported President Joe Biden. With a hope that Democratic leadership despite their hatred for Indians would not be as evil as President Trump.
However they are in a state of shock as President Biden seems to have doubled down on his efforts to target Indian immigrants. Not only the new administration has failed to reverse Trump era policies, the organization has completely broken beyond repair. Some of the application forms can now take as much as 240 months to process. An average H4 visa and EAD now easily takes more than a year when this should take not less than 10 minutes for the USCIS agent if it was filed along with H1B petition of the husband.
The most shocking example of inefficiency at USCIS today however is that they are set to waste 100K greencards this year due to reason no other than sheer inefficiency of USCIS’s officers. It is not clear why the agency did not make any attempts throughout the year to process these visas faster.
It is actually a very simple process however agency got itself panties in twist as it wants to interview every applicant due to Trump policy change, wants medical tests before the green card is approved and wants to sit on the application without doing anything for months. It is only in August that this agency showed some hurry with some nothing burger changes to the process. For USCIS year ends in September which means they have around 1 month to process 100K green cards and there is no way they are going to process those. As per agency’s own numbers made available today, agency has approved only 100K of the total available 250K green cards this year.
What can USCIS to do speed up this number ?
There are many things USCIS could have done to show some efficiency. However I suspect they deliberately slept of it as they do not want to issue green cards to Indians stuck in 150 year long visa backlog. Since many of these Indians (and Indians only) have to renew their H1B and H4 of their spouse and kids it is a huge source of revenue for this agency hence they engage in this capricious behavior where they deliberately refuse to process green cards even though legally they are supposed to.
USCIS could have waived off medial tests or could have asked for medical records after green card approval. Since majority of the people are already inside US borders and some of them living for decades, it makes no sense to do even medical tests.
USCIS also has authority to revoke green cards. They can chose to approve all the green cards without even looking at the papers and revoke those green cards later in future.
USCIS should drastically reduce paperwork and process for other visas so its officers can have more time for green card processing. Since green cards expire by Sept. USCIS must focus on them first.
Why is USCIS so broken ?
If USCIS was a private company most of its employees would have lost their jobs and the CEO would have got fired or would be in jail for fraud.
However since this is a government agency it has no accountability of what so ever. It is not clear how many people work of them, who exactly processes a given form or if there is any checks and balances to monitor performance of each individual agent.
One of the reason why they are so broken and incompetent is that have probably hired very incompetent people. Since there is no accountability perhaps the worst of federal employees end up working for USCIS.
Another reason could be that this is all deliberate. Perhaps Trump and Stephen Miller hired their own moles in this agency who are now running the show and USCIS Director Ur Jaddou and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are clueless about the problems and how to fix them.
Consequences:
USCIS’s lawless and incompetence will have consequences for them and USA. Indian immigrants who are extremely sour about this treatment will seek to end this agency if they ever have any influence in washington. There is a good chance democrats have lost this pretty large votebank for good.
The bigger consequence is that Indian immigrants will now have plan B such as moving to Canada and will not have much respect for American immigrant law. Which means they will openly and brazenly violate American immigration law and thus undermine the law itself.
American immigration law around H1B has been a ponzy scheme which is all about doing lot of paperwork for no real reason or value. If people simply ignore this entire farce, there is nothing USCIS or DHS can do to track and go after the violators.
USCIS must thus work hard for the law obedient immigrants and uphold American law first if they expect immigrants to do the same.
