Check our letter to DHS and USCIS urging them to prioritize adjudication of employment-based green card applications (I-485) as we have heard your concerns about excessively long adjudication wait times for immigration-related petitions.
✅ Timely adjudication of the petitions not only will help pending petitions, but also allows enough time to process additional available green cards for this fiscal year for the backlog community and thus proving our argument all along that the real solution to the backlog is to have more green cards.
The letter highlights:
“[We] urge that you act immediately to have USCIS give high priority to adjudicating adjustments to legal permanent residency for employment-based immigrants. This is action that cannot wait if available visa numbers are to be used before the end of the fiscal year. …
This is a crisis with a deadline: after October 1, many tens of thousands of green cards may be lost, effectively cutting legal immigration substantially through sheer neglect. …
USCIS must dedicate the resources to deliver green cards to backlogged employment-based immigrants before the end of this fiscal year. … it is entirely within the power of your Department to give priority to adjustments of status for employment-based immigrants. This will include many backlogged despite working for years in the US while eligible for green cards that are delayed by Congress’ failure to provide enough.
Under the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1990, 122,000 unused family-based immigration visas from FY20 were added to the 140,000 statutory allocation—-a total of 262,000 available for adjustments of status in the employment-based categories until the end of this fiscal year. If they are not used, they will fall back to family categories where then cannot be used due to statutory limits. But given priority by USCIS, they can make a substantial reduction of the million person backlog that has languished for so long.
But the numbers from the first quarter of FY21 are alarming. If that pace continues into the Biden Administration, more than 150,000 employment-based immigrants and their families will continue to be denied the green cards for which they have been eligible for years.”
Please find our letter here.