Mumbai: As much as 100k plus a work-based green card can be used and wasted, if US citizenship and immigration services (USCIS) cannot judge the same on September 30 (which is the end of the fiscal year).
When the clock ticks, the lawsuit has been submitted to prevent such waste from happening.
Incidentally, this lawsuit was the first submitted after Ur Jaddou’s appointment as Director of USCIS.
The stakes are high, for Indians and China as a waiting period for work-based green cards walking into decades.
The plaintiff is 125 Indian and Chinese citizens who along with their dependents submitting a request for permanent residency (aka green cards) before December 2020.
One of them is the frontline doctor Dr.
C, an Indian citizen, who has been waiting for the Ajudification of I-485 (application For adjustment of green card status) since October 2012 – almost nine years waiting.
The Plaintiff has called the District Court (Maryland) to order USCIS to immediately try their application; And / or that the orders of the USCIS court to order this additional visa number.
“Because of the pandemic, a large number of family-based green cards are approved in the 2020 fiscal year (the year expires September 2020), causing a family-based visa that is not used to ‘roll out’ into a job-based category in the Fiscal Year 2021,” show complaints of a lawsuit.
This creates unique opportunities and liabilities in the Fiscal Year 2021 (September 2021) for USCIS to approve more green card cards than usual, and thus significantly reduced waiting for decades for their Indian and Chinese applicants.
At the beginning of the fiscal year, in October 2020, USCIS announced it would receive applications from thousands of Indian and Chinese citizens who were waiting for years, about a decade.
Finally, when they came.
But their excitement and assistance quickly turned into anxiety because it became clear that USCIS had no plan or intention to process this application on time, which must be decided before the end of the fiscal year, it adds.
The moot point is that if USCIS does not try a job-based green card application in two months of August and September, additional visa numbers that have been rolling from the family category that is not used will be applied.
“This will cause a long visa backlog to grow, and the Plaintiff must wait for years or decades more before they qualify for residencies again,” show complaints of the lawsuit.
Toi often quotes studies conducted by David J Bier, Immigration Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute, a Think-Tank headquartered Washington, which shows that work-based green card backlogs (EB2 and EB3 are skilled categories) for those who have reached 7.41 lakh in April 2020, with the expected waiting time of 84 years.
The i-485 application archiving is the last stage in the process of getting a job-based green card.
Because there are only a number of green cards available per category and there are 7% per country stamp, waiting for Indian and Chinese citizens to the application to be processed is very long.
Dr.
C and his partner, also a doctor, “feels cheated by the immigration system and inhuman treatment given by USCIS personnel”.
This is a many sentiment echoing across the Indian Diaspora in the US.
Some Indian prosecutors are afraid that their children will be aged (turn 21) before the work-based green card application is decided.
It makes children without choice but to transit to a student visa or deport to India.
Bier in his studies have stated that 1.36 lakh children from India families are arrested in this deposit of the EB2 and EB3 green card categories, and 62% of children like it will agreed without getting a green card.
“Since then, USCIS has a commemoration of the increasing number of applications for the Fiscal Year 2021, and knows that this visa must be decided at the end of the fiscal year or truly wasted, it does not make sense that the institution does not plan to be on time.
Processing this application.
The agency gladly accepted millions of dollars in legal fees for the I-485s, fully knowing that it did not have resources or capacity to try thousands of applications received at the end of September, “explained lawsuits.
“If we succeed in ordering 100k plus numbers that are not used by number 2021 we can delete 75% of all EB backlogs in three years,” Charles Kuck’s country, one of the immigration lawyers representing the Plaintiff.
Another lawyer who represents the Plaintiff is Greg Siskind and Jeff Joseph.