If the Trump administration is really dumping the entire grace period for legal immigrants to renew work permits, the Department of Homeland Security needs to rethink a move that means utter, needless chaos.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services only lets you start to renew a work permit six months before it expires — but routinely takes much longer than six months to finish its processing.
It’s one thing if DHS were simply tossing out a Biden-era rule that extended the grace period from 180 days to 540 day: That would still give you six months after expiration for USCIS to get its job done.
But DHS is tossing any grace period, and so guaranteeing that many completely legal immigrants who’ve done their best to keep playing by the rules will be in a serious jam.
The current renewal backlog is estimated at 165,000: Absent a clear DHS plan for getting caught up fast, this move looks like outright malpractice.
Instead, Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem vows that every renewal application will now receive a “robust” screening and vetting (for fraud and national-security threats), which sounds like it’ll make the backlog worse.
Adding insult to apparent injury, DHS announced the change just the day before took effect.
Within weeks, many completely law-abiding immigrants will face a dire crisis, as will their employers and their families.
It’s one thing to crack down on immigration fraud, another thing to make it effectively impossible for the law-abiding to work legally simply because federal bureaucrats can’t do their jobs fast enough.
Experts believe businesses in the media, health care and manufacturing sectors will get especially hard-hit.
Someone at the White House needs to rescind this rule, replace it with something sane and get DHS’s bureaucrats focused on clearing that six-month backlog.
President Donald Trump has always said he’s all for legal immigration; his minions need to get with the program.