201-470-4181
April 12, 2021
Huge Backlog of immigrant visas are the obstacles for President Biden.
By N.A. Pagliara, Esquire of Pagliara Law Group, P.A. posted in Immigration Law Blog on Monday, April 12, 2021.
Almost 2.6 million immigrants have their visa applications pending. About 500,000 of the applicants are “documentarily qualified” and ready for the interview.
Part of the backlog is from the restrictions from the Covid-19 pandemic. While others are from Trump’s policies in the past. Part of the delay was for processing, such as heightened background checks and questionable terrorism designations.
The State Department said that in places that are subject to regional pandemic travel restrictions, it will now let people seeking immigrant and fiancee visas go ahead and apply.
As far as the refugee cap numbers go. Trump’s 2020 cap of 15,000 only allowed this amount of refugee applications. Biden also proposed a target cap of 125,000 for the fiscal year but it was confirmed he will raise it to 62,500 but not certain when.
Some of the things Biden has done do far with Immigration are including but not limtied:
- Reversing the immigration restrictions ranging from a travel ban targeting mostly Muslim-majority countries
- Reversing a policy ban under which certain asylum or immigration applications were rejected if the applicant had left any blank spaces on their forms.
This backlog will be detrimental to legal immigrants and asylum seekers into the next year.
Pandemic Effect that got the blockage started
According to CNN on March 2020, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, the State Department suspended routine visa services at embassies and consulates around the world. Then in April then-President Trump issued and twice extended a proclamation suspending the entry of most immigrants who didn’t already have valid visas until March 31, 2021. The State Department interpreted the bar broadly on entry as also stopping it from issuing most immigrant visas, according to lawsuits against the agency. Although, by July, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began letting consulates and embassies reopen for limited visa operations at the discretion of their local chiefs of mission, most stayed closed for all but emergency services, State Department legal filings show.For security reasons, “you can’t adjudicate visas or passports from home,” said Michele Thoren Bond, a former State Department assistant secretary for consular affairs. “Anything passport, anything visa-related, you have to be in the office to do it; and to initiate visa cases you have to bring the applicants into the embassy for interviews, too. Even if you reopen, you can’t let them come in the numbers that would have been normal, pre-Covid.”In legal filings, the State Department said that because of illnesses and other issues, after Pompeo gave posts the option to reopen, that next month, August, more than two thirds of the 143 US consular posts didn’t schedule a single immigrant visa interview.
Even by January, a third of consulates and embassies still were unable to schedule a single interview. A look at family-preference visas, which are issued to people seeking to join a relative already in the US, show how hard the pandemic restrictions hit a system already slowed by other Trump-administration moves. In February 2017, just after Trump took office, there was a backlog of 2,312 family-preference visa applications, according to Rebecca Austin, assistant director of the National Visa Center at the State Department. Each of the next three years, that backlog more than doubled and doubled again, reaching 26,737 by Feb. 8, 2020. Then, due to the pandemic closures, by February 8 of this year, the backlog leaped to nearly 285,000, she said in a declaration to a federal court in California.
Visa interviews plummet
There is a visa lawsuit that shows that during the month of January 2020, before the pandemic, the State Department scheduled 22,856 family-preference visa interviews, worldwide. This past January, it scheduled 262 — a drop of nearly 99%.Immigration attorneys in several visa lawsuits said the State Department continued to use temporary pandemic bans on entry from certain regions as a reason not to issue visas — even though a federal judge told the State Department last September that plaintiffs seeking to overturn that policy “are likely to succeed” in their claim that it isn’t in accordance with law. The department reversed that policy for immigrant and fiancée visa applicants on Thursday.
To make matters worse there has been a reduction in State workforce to work out the backlog.
AUTHOR: Nicholas A. Pagliara, Esq. Founder, Chairman of the Board and Managing Attorney of Pagliara Law Group, PA.
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