Congressional Democrats Tuesday pressed the Department of Homeland Security to clear a backlog of 1.4 million work permit applications for migrants before the end of the year.
Despite several policy changes to address wait times at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, more than 900,000 immigrants seeking their first work permits and half a million more looking to renew the documents remain “at the mercy of USCIS’s bureaucratic processing delays,” according to a letter from 70 House and Senate Democrats led by Sen.
Many temporary visa holders and people with humanitarian protections like asylum seekers must apply for Employment Authorization Documents before they can legally work in the US. Lawmakers urged the administration to act before Biden leaves office at the beginning of next year.
“In light of these facts, we urge the administration to ramp up its efforts to eliminate the ongoing work permit backlog before the end of President Biden’s term,” the lawmakers said in an Oct. 22 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and USCIS Director Ur Jaddou.
USCIS in April issued a temporary rule preserving the validity of work permits for about 800,000 immigrants who faced lapses in employment authorization because of renewal delays. The rule extended an automatic grace period for applicants with pending renewals to a year and a half, a step it first took in 2022.
The lawmakers called for USCIS to quickly follow through on plans to make that rule, which will sunset in October 2025, permanent. And they said the agency should adopt technology and add more staff capacity to clear backlogs.
The letter also called for streamlining employment authorization by allowing immigrants paroled into the US to automatically get work permits, rather than applying separately, and by allowing submission of a work permit application to serve as provisional authorization while an application is pending.
Maria Eran, an asylum seeker from Iran and member of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, said in a statement that she’s nearly lost her job twice because of extended waits for a work permit to be processed. ASAP has led other requests for action on work permit delays and has worked with Congressional offices on proposed policy changes like those outlined in the letter.
“Immigrants are proud to contribute to our local communities in the U.S., but work permit delays are endangering our ability to do so,” she said.
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