GOOD NEWS: USCIS has agreed to call off its planned furlough of 13,500 employees which had been scheduled for this weekend.
BAD NEWS: In exchange for this, the U.S. House of Representatives has unanimously agreed to let USCIS raise the premium processing fee from $1440 to $2500 for O and P petitions and cancel the outside contractors who help process and intake petitions, thereby slowing down standard processing.
There has, as yet, been no announcement of when the higher premium processing fee will go into effect. As with the other recent fee increases, USCIS will be required to go through a regulatory processes whereby they will ask for public comment, ignore that, and then raise the fee anyway.
So, just in case you’re not following along:
- USCIS got into this financial mess was because its policies resulted in fewer people filing petitions and, therefore, less revenue.
- It stamped its foot and threated furloughs and slowdowns unless it got $1.3 billion dollars by August 30.
- They knew that they were never likely to get $1.3 billion from an administration that would prefer them just to shut down completely.
- So, USCIS has agreed to cancel the furloughs in exchange for being allowed to slow everything down anyway with the expectation that this will force people to pay for premium processing, and then raise the premium processing fee so that fewer people can afford it, thereby resulting in even fewer people filing petitions.
On a related note, historians have recently unearthed a photo of the skeletal remains of Ken Cuccinelli, the Acting (“illegally”) Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services taken just prior to when Trump poured rabid squirrel blood into his tomb.
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