From ELLIOT SPAGAT – Associated Press
SAN DIEGO (AP) – The head of the US citizenship and visa awarding agency says he’s got a grip on finances that threatened massive vacations last year and is preparing to propose fees for his services, which not restricting legal immigration to the “very” wealthy, “a blow to the Trump administration’s tenet that newcomers should be financially independent.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service was on the verge of taking off nearly 70% of its 20,000 employees in the summer of 2020 when it declared almost overnight that it would end the year in a large surplus.
USCIS, the acronym by which the agency is known, relies almost entirely on fee collections for an annual operation of nearly $ 5 billion. The reserves at the end of the fiscal year ended September 30th were $ 1.5 billion “where we want to be,” agency director Ur Jaddou said in an interview with The Associated Press.
A temporary hiring freeze introduced in March 2020, spending controls and the waiver of new biometric data to extend benefits have helped put the agency on a stronger footing, she said.
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“I understand what the problems were and how they were ‘solved’ – I want to put that in quotation marks because we are in an unsafe situation, but we are pretty, we are strong,” said Jaddou.
Trump administration officials have attributed the return from the financial abyss last year to unexpectedly high fees collected during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic and the termination of some contracts.
USCIS, which also plays a leading role in asylum and refugee settlement, may be a far less well-known name than other Department of Homeland Security agencies like the Border Patrol, but it’s vital to the immigration system. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who was then representing a district in the Miami area in Congress, said at a USCIS finance hearing last year that about 70% of calls to her office were related to their work.
The Trump administration brought big changes to the agency, including expanding its fraud investigation department and emphasizing that immigrants insist on being financially independent in order to stay in the country.
Fees for wealthier applicants have long subsidized other non-revenue operations such as asylum. President Joe Biden’s administration will soon propose a new fee structure for the agency.
“First, we believe that the immigration system shouldn’t be reserved for the rich,” Jaddou said, contrasting with the Trump-era mantra of self-sufficiency.
Jaddou, who was born in the San Diego area and raised by Mexican and Iraqi immigrant parents, served as USCIS Chief Counsel during President Barack Obama’s second term, working with Alejandro Mayorkas, a former USCIS director who is now their boss as Homeland Security Secretary. During Donald Trump’s presidency, she was the director of DHS Watch, a group funded by America’s Voice immigration initiative. During an interview in October 2020, she recited key financial and operational metrics from memory in which she said a tax review should be the new USCIS director’s first priority.
On Thursday, USCIS released a list of “Achievements” for the fiscal year ended September 30, including naturalized citizenship for 855,000 people, job-related green cards for 172,000, and aid to tens of thousands of Afghans and their families residing after the end of America’s 20 Years War in their country.
The waiting times for applications for citizenship increased last year, as it did during Trump’s presidency, to about a year. The agency acknowledged a growing backlog on all benefits, recently topping 8 million, but noted that biometric requirements for renewals and other efficiency measures will be dropped as “significant advances”.
More than four months after the Senate approved Jaddous’s nomination by 47-34 votes by party lines, the director assesses the changes in the Trump era, including expanding the anti-fraud unit and pushing the citizenship off of people who lie to them have achieved or fraud.
Jaddou has not undone a 2018 change to the agency’s mission statement that sparked heavy praise and criticism. The Trump-appointed Francis Cissna has deleted the reference to the USA as a “nation of immigrants”.
“We’re working on it,” said Jaddou.
Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed in any way without permission.
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