Work Permits for our U Visa applicants are coming back quickly!

From the desk of Jonathan Fung

The current administration has made a longstanding promise to reform US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to protect and prioritize the most vulnerable of immigrants - those who have experienced serious crimes such as domestic violence. In exchange for cooperation with law enforcement, these U-Visa applicants are promised a work permit, protection from deportation, and a pathway to citizenship.

While we have helped file these applications since 2016, many of our clients are still waiting for their cases to be examined by a USCIS officer, with bureaucratic backlogs that push processing times to the very first step in the process - determining whether or not an application is "Bona Fide" and legitimate, to over 5 or 6 years. This backlog has had a real effect on our clients, delaying their ability to become financially independent from their abusers and delaying their road to recovery by preventing them from receiving promised work permits. Reports of reform within USCIS to speed up these processing times became increasingly implausible as years passed without any change.

However, at the very beginning of this year, our office was surprised to see an entire batch of approvals for work permits for our U Visa applicants. The approvals ranged across a wide span of years, from people who have been waiting 1-5 years since applying without hearing anything from USCIS. With this change in USCIS policy, we began to see real hope for our clients to receive work permits in a timely manner. Many of our clients expressed grateful surprise as their expectations for receiving a social security number and entering our workforce were moved up by years. Samantha, our Client Experience Coordinator, has been calling our clients non-stop to tell them the good news and to arrange appointments. 

It's a busy start to the new year - but we are encouraged by moments such as this that we are moving constantly towards greater empowerment of our immigrant survivor community.