Is USCIS going to shut down? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. Today, we're talking about furloughs. Furlough is a strange word. A furlough is when people are sent home and not paid for their jobs. And there have been rumors since July of 2020 that USCIS is going to start furloughing their employees. They keep extending out the deadline and they keep asking Congress for help. Congress has held hearings on whether or not USCIS should be given additional money.
Of course, we know from prior videos that the current administration and the people that are running Homeland Security and USCIS are a bunch of clowns who couldn't manage a lemonade stand, much less USCIS. And so, here they've run the agency completely into the ground and they have turned it into such an enforcement mechanism and an enforcement police that we're not seeing their cases processed properly. And they have all this bulk and weight of this big bureaucratic agency. And while there are people at USCIS who are trying to do a good job, the forces are stacked against them. And more importantly, they're stacked against the immigrants.
So we've seen such an assault on immigrants and on the legal immigration process, that this is just one more trick in their bag of tricks to try to keep legal immigration from occurring. And so, the people that run USCIS would like nothing else for the agency to grind to a halt. That is their longterm goal. Their longterm goal is to stop immigration, both legal and "illegal immigration." And so, this trick of laying everybody off and running out of money because they diverted the money to other enforcement agencies is right out of their playbook. It's exactly what they're trying to do.
So it'll be interesting. The House passed legislation recently to fund USCIS, which of course is ridiculous because USCIS is 90% run off of filing fees. And this is just a total example of mismanagement. So we will wait and see if the Senate passes the bill and/or if President Trump signs the bill, but there has been some movement lately in Congress about the furloughs. And we'll see if they keep going.
Now, one thing I'm not sure about is USCIS's fiscal year starts again on October 1st. So if there are furloughs, I'm not sure if they would end on October 1st or not. I would think that there'd be new funding at that point. But like I said, USCIS is supposed to be self-funded, so maybe the start of the new fiscal year would not help them. I'm just not sure. I should probably look into that. But in the meantime, USCIS is still open. We're still filing applications and we'll continue to do that, even if they do engage in furloughs.
It's just unbelievable how many delays and hurdles they've put in place in front of legal immigration, but I'm getting pretty sick of it. If you have questions about the furloughs, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. And if you liked this video, we ask you to please share it out on social and then subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos, just like this one. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
