Also, @doug_rand says USCIS needs to use its authority to extend premium processing to other forms, raising revenue to hire adjudicators and reduce the backlog for everyone.
Here's one of my new suggestions that I submitted as part of our comments. @gsiskind helped me with the implications for doctors. I published it as a blog post today. cato.org/blog/uscis-dol…
@angelopaparelli and co's comments include surveys of its clients on many issues. Very interesting! I love: "The inability for USCIS to authorize auto-extensions of Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) where agency processing delays result in work authorization gaps "
There are so many good ideas here! Masterful!
I plan on writing about many of these ideas on the coming days.
@BrentRenison suggests USCIS retain the priority date for a derivative child who has aged out of EB eligibility but then enters the FB line. He notes SCOTUS has already affirmed USCIS's authority to go through with this change in 2014. Why did USCIS fail to do it under Obama?
@BrentRenison elaborates on the need for automatic EAD extensions
@BrentRenison with another great suggestion! Why are EADs valid for such a short period? It makes no sense!
More from @BrentRenison. How does a rule like this persist for so long? It's like the only lights in the USCIS building are at the adjudicators' desks, and so no one can see even a tiny big of the big picture
More from @BrentRenison. I'm getting enraged reading this. This agency is supposed to be the "pro-immigrant" immigration agency but it's actually an awful Kafka-esque bureaucratic disaster
More from @BrentRenison. If it takes more than 6 months to adjudicate something, shouldn't the timeline for filing *automatically adjust* to a period much earlier than that?
Moving onto @AILANational's comment. You really get the sense that USCIS *desperately* needed to this feedback. Its new leadership was never going to discover most of this on their own when so much has gone into making this dysfunctional system
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat... YOU ARE AN IMMIGRATION AGENCY!
So much basic, basic, basic, mind-numbingly basic stuff here
USCIS: "We're going to make things easier for you! Oh but we aren't going to talk to anyone before we make things easier... We're just going to wing it! Don't you love us?"
When was the last time anyone really cared about a functioning legal immigration system? Abraham Lincoln?
I just realized that AILA's comment is 20 pages. I'm only 4 pages in. Of course, Cato's comment is 40 pages, but AILA's has probably 5 times as many suggestions. Ah! This one cuts me deep. Unreliable and unhelpful data are the worst!
Last in, first out is turning the entire asylum application process into a sham. USCIS needs to fix this! 15 year wait for processing! Insanity!
It's crazy to me that USCIS has adjudications to get to its adjudications which are only caused by failure to adjudicate still other forms!
Here's another no-one-really-cares-about-you note from USCIS
Apparently this isn't happening. My brain hurts. Who has run this agency for the last 2 decades? Not to repeat, but obviously no one has really looked at why this agency is so messed up before.
There are so many Trump policies still around. How is this possible? These are the EASY things to identify?
It certainly seems that at least some people at USCIS do not want people to easily know what the law is.
Every one of these things are enough to impeach the agency for high crimes
More Trump changes that inexplicably persist. USCIS should put into regulations that none of this is discretionary at the officer level so they can't keep easily undoing this.
CBP shouldn't get to make these decisions at all. Who cares if someone's passport is going to expire before the end of their stay? That's their problem, not CBP's. CBP should always approve for whatever the I-797 says.
An intriguing proposal. I wasn't aware that Es weren't already considered "dual intent" by virtue of the fact that they don't have to have a residence abroad that they have "no intention of abandoning" like Hs.
You would really think that Trump would've wanted more competition for @AlexNowrasteh and friends! Why is Biden keeping this?
Here's another one of my new suggestions that I submitted: "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should increase the three‐year limit on H-2B and H-2A extensions of status to six years." cato.org/blog/uscis-sho…
I'm hopeful that USCIS will actually do this one (unlike some of my other H-2 suggestions) because it increases the bargaining power of H-2 workers relative to their employers. If employers know that you can't extend, that's a real problem for you! cato.org/blog/uscis-sho…
Wow. Three "comply withs" in a row. USCIS is as lawless as the rest of them.
Interesting. I'd love to hear what the legal arguments are here, but let's recapture as many unused numbers as possible!
Several commenters just submitted our list of ideas to which I added three more for the comments we submitted. cato.org/publications/s…
I was always very confused by how this case turned out, but it's a great suggestion from @the_ILRC. We currently are violating the text of the law to obtain an "equal" result that harms people who are being "equalized". It doesn't make sense to me.
Ugh... there's so many problems. It's one reason why @angelopaparelli and I urged the president and the agency to require leniency in favor of the applicants in the interpretation of all laws and rules. Anything ambiguous should go to the applicant.
@NFAPResearch nails this. DHS should stop inaccurately describing its overstay report as a report on "overstays." Obama started this thing, and then Trump predictably misused it to cancel visas for certain nationalities. USCIS should clearly state that it can't count overstays
Back to @the_ILRC's awesome comments. Trying to banish people for using legal marijuana is an example of how the immigration agencies take part in some of the worst abuses of government power
Please leftists never nationalize all businesses. This is horrific.
How America treats noncitizen crime victims is illustrative of how much it values noncitizens generally.
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Bill said I should read the affidavit. And WOW it shows that everything ICE has said publicly (and Fox and Bill have dutifully regurgitated as fact) about this surgical center case was a LIE. This was not a "targeted" operation, but a racial profiling incident gone bad!
DHS initially claimed that the officers were engaged in a "targeted" enforcement operation--that is, this was not a random racial profiling incident, but the affidavit repudiates this directly, saying the agents were on a roving patrol
DHS initially claimed it had targeted them "as they exited their vehicle." The affidavit has them already outside the vehicle while their friend pees on the surgical center. This contradictory piss is legally irrelevant and looks like an ad hoc effort to discredit the workers
It appears that an order went out on January 28 of this year that resulted in the proliferation of ICE masking.
The irony is that the way this order is portrayed that it is about disclosing their identity, but perhaps this is not how it was interpreted on the ground or there was resistance on the ground to it. cnn.com/2025/01/27/pol…
I've actually found an agent partially masking from Jan. 27 but most agents are not.
Every American should read this ACLU lawsuit about what is happening in California. It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. This is not immigration enforcement. It is positively stuffed with videos and articles documenting racial profiling on a scale unseen since Jim Crow.
Fixing the link: Citizens being assaulted, arrested, and sent to jails. Military-style sweeps of Hispanic neighborhoods. This is what Congress just gave President Trump $150 billion to do to Americans in every state. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Completely irrelevant. This lawsuit is not alleging that it is illegal to deport Hispanic illegal immigrants. It is alleging that ICE and Border Patrol are harassing, detaining, and arresting Hispanics without any reason to believe they are here illegally
I have obtained new nonpublic data from ICE that shows that 2/3 of the people it had booked into detention facilities this fiscal year had no criminal convictions at all. Less than 7% have violent convictions. Most convictions were for immigration, traffic, and vice offenses.
Every time you hear DHS say that anyone who objects to ICE's mass deportation campaign is pro-violent felons, understand that those violent convicts are less than 7% of its work for this year. It's misleading the public about what ICE actually does. cato.org/blog/65-people…
The number of noncriminals booked into ICE detention has more than doubled in recent weeks after Stephen Miller ordered them to deprioritize criminals and focus on arresting as many people as possible.
Contrary to claims made by its proponents, the mass deportations' components of the Big Beautiful Bill will not improve its CBO score. Indeed, it will make it much worse. Accounting for lost net revenue from immigrants adds nearly $1 trillion in additional cost.
Adopting HR 1's flawed assumptions, mass deportations will likely account for 1/4 of the bill's total deficit. This is far more than many other hotly debated costs in the bill. Congressional Republicans didn't let the CBO account for deportations cato.org/blog/deportati…
Immigration/border policing already accounts for 2/3 of all federal law enforcement spending. 36 X IRS-Treasury, 21X ATF, 13X DEA, and 8X FBI. These are the most well-funded law enforcement agencies in America by far.
The immigration dictatorship just announced a ban on immigration for 12 nationalities with 7 more facing draconian discrimination as well. Horrible policies with no justification
Here are the 19 disfavored nationalities, which have produced many Americans of great character who have benefited our country enormously. In 1965, Congress attempted to rid American immigration law of this rank nonsensically national origins discrimination. It should again.
Trump uses a slight-of-hand saying he's restricting immigration "from" these places, but the proclamation does not restrict immigration "from" these PLACES but by persons who happen to be nationals of these countries. It's important for him to maintain this fiction...