Is USCIS screwing around anymore?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our offices in St. Louis, San Diego and Washington, DC, coming to you from Catalina Island in California, very close to San Diego and LA. Wanted to make this video to let you know that USCIS is not screwing around when it comes to being lazy. What do I mean by that? Well, I had the opportunity to hear from the general counsel and the deputy director of USCIS last week in a hearing on some federal cases we have up in Maryland. And I can't tell you how many different levels of we're not doing anything. We're not getting any better. We're throwing in the towel. Delays just sort of systemic to the process. We can't do much more to make cases go faster. And there's just this whole overall malaise or just lack of urgency.
It's a bureaucracy, we know. We know it's the federal government. We know that they are funded by the fees that USCIS applicants pay but there's just no real sense that anything is important or that they have to move faster. And you wouldn't believe all the rationales and excuses. Well, they said, "We didn't get a lot of applications in during COVID and so therefore we don't have a lot of money for staffing. And so because of that, we have to limit our resources and we have to figure out where we spend our money." But of course at the same time, they're saying how many applications they are behind. How can they say on the one hand that the number of cases are down but on the other hand, they can't process the cases because they have too many cases?
It's just circular reasoning, typical government bureaucratic bullshit and we're just stuck with it. And so if you think that this process is going to be easy, if you think that this process is going to be fast, if you think that there's anybody out there looking out for your best interests other than your lawyers, you're nuts. There's just way too much baked in delay, way too much baked in bureaucracy and we're just not seeing any kind of movement. It's just been more frustrating than ever. And obviously Donald Trump is out of office but it doesn't seem like the people who came to pick up where he left off are in any kind of sense of making things move faster. It's frustrating. It's saddening. Our clients are off and they're tired of it and I totally get it. Just wanted to say, I understand.
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