USCIS is not furloughing 70% of staff, but fees will increase soon
USCIS has called off the previously announced furlough of 13,400 employees, 70% of its staff, which would have taken effect on August 30, 2020. Please click here to see the news release on USCIS’s website. Nevertheless, USCIS announced that it will have to make severe budget cuts, which will still have the effect of slowing processing and increasing processing backlogs. USCIS is still requesting emergency funding from Congress in order to avoid the severe cuts and still maintain its current staffing and operations level, but it is attempting to solve its own budget shortfalls with a fee increases, which it had announced before its current budget crisis.
Congress has not been eager or quick to grant USCIS’s request for emergency funding, because Congress wants to see USCIS use less of its resources pursuing the aggressive enforcement agenda that the Trump Administration has set for it, which has the effect of tying up many more working hours of USCIS’s examiners searching to find problems in an applicant’s immigration history, and spending much more time issuing pointless boilerplate requests for evidence, which often request evidence that has already been submitted or have no probative value with regard to the applicant’s eligibility for the immigration benefit. Please click here to view an article in the Washington Post on this topic.
Nevertheless, Congress, as represented by the Subcommittee on Homeland Security and the Committee on Appropriations, in both the House and Senate, expressed its willingness to intervene to help USCIS if its fee income decreases or if USCIS cannot manage in spite of the upcoming fee increase, in a letter in which it urged USCIS to cancel its planned furlough of 13,400 USCIS employees.
USCIS has designated October 2, 2020, as the date when its application fee changes will take effect. Please click here to view USCIS’s publication of the final rule implementing the fee increase. It is interesting to note that the fees for some application types are being drastically increased, while others are being decreased. For instance, the fees (application fee + biometrics fee) for naturalization applications is being increased by $475 to $1,200, while the fees (application fee + biometrics fee) for adjustment of status are being decreased by $65 to $1,160. The fees (application fee + biometrics fee) for renewing the green card, the I-90 application, are also decreasing by $105 to $435.
USCIS is trying to adjust its fees to be more proportionate to the amount of work that it takes its examiners to process and decide each case type. For this reason, instead of the one-size-fits-all current fee of $460 for all I-129 employment-based visa petitions, USCIS will charge processing fees that they consider to be more proportionate to the volume of work required to process the petition for each specific visa type. These fee increases range from $95 to over $390, while only two work visa categories have received fee decreases of $45 and $75.
I would mainly recommend to anyone who is eligible for naturalization (citizenship) and considering to apply, now would be the time to move forward before the fees increase by $475. It is now possible to apply online and get confirmation of filing instantly. When filing electronically, you avoid the risk of someone in the mailroom at USCIS improperly rejecting and returning your application, which would, at this point, result in you losing the opportunity to file before the fees increase.
Below are the tables comparing the current fees and new fees that will take effect on October 2, 2020.
