Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials say they’ve made headway on a processing backlog that reached a high point in 2020.
The largely fee-funded agency that processes visas, work permits and other services for DACA recipients, specialty workers, asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrants.
USCIS Director Ur Jaddou told the the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Wednesday that the backlog was made worse by several factors.
“A perfect storm of policy and operational decisions, COVID, and a severely outdated fee structure, led to a fiscal crisis at USCIS,” she said.
Jaddou said 70% of the USCIS workforce had been given furlough notices, the agency went into a hiring freeze and support contracts had to be terminated.
But since 2021, she said tech updates, a new fee structure and other changes have helped reduce the backlog and improve financial issues.
“Although we’re still working to decrease that backlog, our diligence and focus has led to the decrease of the backlog for the first time in a decade, two years in a row.
Jaddou said things like increased digital filing, and a new fee structure had also led to more financial stability. In January, USCIS said it completed more than 10 million immigration cases in the 2023 fiscal year, but received roughly the same number of new cases.
