How is Joe Biden doing in immigration? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, San Diego, and Washington DC.
In today's video we're going to talk about the state of things at USCIS. We are months and months into the Biden administration. He's been president now for a little over eight months. Alejandro Mayorkas was put in as the head of homeland security, and Ur Jaddou recently got appointed to be the head of USCIS.
I wanted to check in with you all, give you my thoughts on where things are right now at USCIS. Things aren't a whole lot better than they were under the Trump administration. Of course, we know that there was a pandemic and we know that that slowed things down. We understand that. We also know that there was a deliberate attempt to dismantle our immigration service, both at the embassies abroad and at USCIS here in America. We understand that there was a daily attack on immigrants for the last four years. We get all that. We get that they have baked into the process delay and delay and delay, and that that's sort of the plan.
I've never seen immigration as bad as it is right now. The administration is in over its head, they don't know what they're doing, and they're not making fixing things a priority. There are so many things that they could be doing to make life easier for immigrants, to make things faster, and they're simply not doing it. They're just sitting on their heels, they're crying in their milk, and they're saying, "Oh, woe is me. Trump screwed us up. We can't do anything. Sorry about that, folks." That's not what they should be doing. They need a declaration of war on the prior administration's policies. They need to be innovative, they need to be smart, they need to be efficient. They need to bring back InfoPass, they need to make it easier for people to talk to an immigration officer, they need to take back that funding that Trump diverted from USCIS to Customs and Border Patrol, and they need to put people in charge who care about immigrants. They need to look at the entire process, from the filing at the lockbox, to the processing, to the transfer of the case from USCIS to the National Visa Center, from the National Visa Center to overseas, or to the field office.
They have to look at each and every field office. Why are you taking so long? Where are these cases? They need to start pushing people to decide these cases faster. They need to take out a lot of the baked-in delays caused by these multiple levels of extra scrutiny that Trump and his team put in for alleged fraud security to check that people weren't getting immigration benefits to which they were not entitled.
There's no reason why they can't take this affirmative approach, this action-packed approach, but instead they're just slow walking it, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We'll get to it when we get to it. We don't have have enough funding. We don't have enough people. Sorry about that." Yeah, it's just a joke. It's like, if they are the people in charge, they are the big boys and the big girls now, they are leading the show. The days of blaming Trump, the days of blaming Steven Miller and Steve Bannon are over. It's over. Now you're on the clock. You're in charge. You have the keys to the kingdom. You have the power, and you're not doing anything.
Another thing that's really driving me crazy with this administration is they're continuing a lot of the litigation strategies of the Trump administration. They are still fighting in court to deny diversity visa holders their day in court, to deny employment visas. They fought that tooth and nail up until September 30th when those visas expired. Their number one priority is preserving the sanctity of homeland security and preserving the sanctity of USCIS. Their priority is not you. Their priority is not your loved one. Their priority is not getting benefits bestowed upon people who deserve them. Their priority is maintaining the status quo, keeping their jobs, and protecting their asses. That's what they're about. That's what this team is about.
It's become crystal clear that we're not going to see any revolutionary changes in immigration, that the vast majority of those delays and difficulties that Trump and his team baked into immigration, they're not going to go anyway anytime soon, and they're not going to go away until someone in power decides we're going to make this better.
This is my thoughts for today. These are what we're seeing. It's really sad and I'm really sorry that you're going through this. If there's anything we can do to help you as you go through this, let us know. You can give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us, [email protected]. You can join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. If you like this video, we ask you to please share it out on social and that you subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one. Thanks a lot and have a great day.
