The big Immigration news today in all major news papers that cover US Immigration is the massive delays in application processing. As you may recall due to the fee hike in July millions of applicants filed for Immigration benefits, like Citizenship, family petitions etc.
The application backlog is so large that Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Homeland Security Department, is months behind schedule in returning receipts for checks written to cover fees and indicate to clients that the files are in process.
I get calls every single day from clients inquiring about case status, and all we can tell them is that the case is in process. It just doesn’t make sense for this to take so long, but the USCIS were not ready for this volume and now applicants are paying the price.
“Were we caught off guard by the volume? Let’s just say it was anticipated it would increase. It was not anticipated it would increase by that much,” said Emilio Gonzalez, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services.