Senate Judiciary Democrats called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate the Trump administration’s sweeping pauses on immigration processing, saying the indefinite holds amount to an effort to circumvent the country’s immigration system.
In two letters to Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, shared first with NOTUS, the senators highlight the administration’s blanket holds on new applications and its decision to re-examine cases of people already approved for green cards or citizenship.
Despite repeated inquiries, the senators say, the Trump administration has not articulated to Congress a clear legal or evidentiary basis for the changes, creating widespread confusion among immigrants, employers and their communities.
“We are deeply concerned that these changes — which have left immigrants, their families, and employers at a loss for how to obtain or maintain lawful status or presence — are an attempt to circumvent the statutory scheme for lawful immigration to the United States, rather than a legitimate exercise in improving the integrity of our immigration system,” the Democrats said in the letters, led by Minority Whip Dick Durbin, who is also the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as Sens. Chris Coons and Alex Padilla.
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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services placed an indefinite hold on the entire affirmative asylum process in November, suspending 1.4 million pending applications.
Senators asked the watchdog agency to examine the evidentiary basis for the pauses, including whether USCIS and the State Department conducted any analysis of national security, fraud or public safety risks before freezing adjudications.
They also want to know how much money the government has collected in fees from applicants whose cases are now frozen and unprocessed, and what — if any — plan exists to resume normal operations.
USCIS separately has launched what the senators describe as an “unprecedented” campaign to review immigration benefits that had already been granted, including to naturalized U.S. citizens.
USCIS said in a March 30 statement that many applicants for naturalization and lawful permanent residence “were not sufficiently vetted” and that some who were naturalized “should not have been.”
Democrats are asking the GAO to investigate whether the re-examination program is producing different outcomes than the original adjudications.
The senators write in the letter that they made a series of information requests to “to provide clarity to immigrants, American families, and the American public regarding these re-reviews.”
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