Why are work cards taking so long? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, Missouri and San Diego, California.
In the old days, when you applied for a green card, you would file your case, you'd get your receipt notice about 10 days later and then about 10 days after that, you'd get a biometrics notice and then you would have your biometrics interview about three or four weeks later. That is your fingerprinting and your photographing for purposes of your green card. That's how it used to work. That's how it's supposed to work, but that's not how it's working these days. These days, we're seeing people experience delays of months. Months, and I'm talking three, four, five, six months to get their work card.
Now this is all by design. These are the remnants of the Trump administration really trying to put the screws to immigrants. And one of the great ways that they've done that and when I say great, I mean significant not good. One of the big ways that they've done that is by slowing down the processing of work cards. Now, if you operate from the assumption that there were really smart people working in immigration for the last four years under President Trump and that they were trying to do everything they can to make life harder for immigrants, then you'll understand why this has happened. There's no real reason why work cards should be delayed. There's really no reason why biometrics notices should be delayed or receipt notices should be delayed. This is all by design. They stripped a ton of the budget of USCIS and they put it into Trump's magical wall on the Mexican border, the wall that went nowhere and they cut back on the processing, the ability of USCIS to process these applications. And again, that's all by design. They wanted to make life harder for immigrants.
We are seeing absurd delays and this is really having real world effects on people. We talk to people all the time who are trying to get an EAD through OBT or as an H4 four holder or as a green card applicant. And across the board, these cases, just these little parts of the case, they're not even the whole case, they're just the work card. The work cards are taking longer and longer and longer. Now, hopefully with a change in administration, we're going to see things get back to normal and that processing times for issuing the biometrics notice and processing times for actually issuing the work card will speed up. Now, those who would support President Trump probably would say, "Well, COVID has something to do with that." Well, I've been down to the USCIS service centers. I've seen the places where the people are getting fingerprinted and there's no doubt that they could be a whole lot busier.
This is all by design. It has very little to do with COVID. It has much, much, much more to do with putting the screws to immigrants. Hopefully that's going to come to an end and they're going to figure out ways to get these work cards created more quickly. I think you're going to see some more litigation about this and it really is ridiculous and it's really unfortunate because it really puts a hardship on a lot of immigrants. People get stuck without the ability to work for a whole lot longer than they need to. And of course, that's not good for anybody except for the people that hate immigrants.
If you have questions about your work card, where the hell you work card is, give us a call, (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. We have this great Facebook group it's called Immigrant Home. You should join us there. We'd love to see you there. We share a lot of information in there every day. We also have our YouTube channel, which you might be watching this video on, but if you haven't subscribed yet, go ahead and do so. That way, whenever we make a new video, you'll get updated right away. And finally on Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually at noon Central time, I'll be live in the YouTube page and in the Facebook group answering as many questions as I can related to immigration in just one hour. Hope that we'll see you there and if you have any questions, just let us know. Thanks a lot.
