The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is struggling to keep up with a piling number of immigration cases, reaching an all-time high of 11.3 million pending applications.Immigration attorneys said the Trump administration’s efforts to find fraudulent cases have set back the pace of the process and resulted in “massive backlogs” across an immigration system that is already grappling with a growing number of cases, as reported by Newsweek. The data from USCIS from January to March indicates that, with backlogs growing in number every quarter, certain immigration categories are going through worsening delays as processing times are stretched. Applicants have to wait for months or even years in the end. Charles Kuck, the founding partner at Kuck Baxter in Atlanta, told Newsweek, “The Trump administration has told USCIS to slow down processing of cases. Predictably, the system has quickly developed massive backlogs. By the end of 2028, we will pine for the days of a functioning legal immigration system because it will effectively not exist by the end of the Trump term.”USCIS is funded solely by fees from immigrants applying for services like green cards and work permits. For years, reports have pointed to problems with this model, including ongoing staffing shortages that cause long delays.Processing times for Form I-90 (Application to Replace Permanent Resident Card) and Form I-765 (Application for Employment Authorization, with the EAD card issued via Form I-766) have risen compared to the previous quarter. This increase is partly due to USCIS suspending its Streamlined Case Processing (SCP) program, an automated system that sped up approvals without officer review. The suspension aims to allow for more thorough vetting, though no timeline has been set for reinstating the program.Certain categories, however, have shown signs of improvement with the backlog of Form 1-131 (advance parole application) reduced by almost 60,000 cases this fiscal year, but 260,000 cases are still pending.“It is still early to draw firm conclusions from the data, as processing trends may shift based on staffing, litigation, or new policy guidance. However, outside the boundaries of congressional mandates or statutory requirements, what may appear to be backlogs may be better described as policy choices,” Morgan Bailey, a partner at Mayor Brown and former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, told Newsweek
