Alert for delay of USCIS for Employment Authorization to immigrants; lawyers sue

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government over "huge delays" in processing work permits by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services ( USCIS ).

The lawsuit, filed Monday by 49 individual plaintiffs and AILA, among others, seeks to hold the Administration of President Joe Biden to account for the “extreme delays” in processing applications for employment authorization documents for foreigners who seek an adjustment of status (AOS) and for non-immigrant spouses with E-2 visas.

Jesse Bless, director of Federal Litigation at AILA, criticized these requests can take between 20 and 21.5 months, according to data from the USCIS itself.

" That is an unacceptable amount of time to process the work authorization and shows that the agency has not fulfilled its promise to process EAD (work permit) in 90 days, except on rare occasions," he said.

The lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and USCIS, filed in a district court in Washington DC, seeks to have the Government and USCIS re-commit immediately to their processing time, according to a statement from AILA.

In the opinion of Farshad Owji, of the Wolfsdorf Rosenthal law firm and member of AILA, it is "incredibly difficult to depend on a slow bureaucracy to be able to work legally " and that he hopes that this litigation will help to "correct this error".