By Catherine Rampell
The Washington Post
What do you do if immigrants learn how to navigate the latest booby trap you’ve set for them?
If you’re the Trump administration, you set that trap for someone else those immigrants must rely on — such as law enforcement or medical personnel, who submit evidence for certain visa applications.
Last fall, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services introduced perhaps its most arbitrary, absurd modification yet to the immigration system: It began rejecting applications unless every single field was filled in, even those that obviously did not pertain to the applicant.
“Middle name” field left blank because the applicant does not have a middle name? Sorry, your application gets rejected. No apartment number because you live in a house? You’re rejected, too.
No address given for your parents because they’re dead? No siblings named because you’re an only child? No work history dates because you’re an 8-year-old kid?
All real cases, all rejected
So USCIS adapted — by requiring unsuspecting third parties to clear the same hurdle.
In late June, new fine print appeared on USCIS’s website. It said the no-blanks policy would extend to at least one document that must be filled out by law enforcement officials — someone over whom immigrants and their lawyers had no control. These officials must complete and sign a form certifying that immigrants applying for the crime-victim (U) visa are assisting with an investigation or prosecution.
Immigration attorneys say that even when they have good relationships with law enforcement, completing these certifications can require months of nudging, cajoling and begging.
“Sometimes the police department is like five people,” said Josh Doherty, a lawyer at the nonprofit Ayuda. “Understandably, if you are an agency of five people, and you’re responsible for public safety and traffic enforcement, and all these other different things, you might miss an email or letter.”
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“These are officers who have sometimes already gone above and beyond to recertify the case during covid, and now we have to bother them again to ask for these cosmetic changes,” says Safiya N. Morgan, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group.
Separately, in recent months, at least two other attorneys have received denials from USCIS for blanks on other forms filled out by third parties — in both cases, a medical examination report required for green card applications. That document is signed by a USCIS-certified physician and submitted to the agency in a sealed envelope. Immigrants are not allowed to even view the completed form to make sure the doctor left nothing blank.
Unlike with the law enforcement certifications, USCIS has not publicly confirmed whether it is systemically applying its no-blanks policy to medical forms, or if those denials were perhaps the action of a rogue official. Alerts on USCIS’s website flag the no-blanks policy only for asylum, crime-victim and trafficking-victim visas, despite rejections lawyers have received for blanks on other types of applications. The agency did not respond to questions about how or when it was deciding to enforce the policy.
This Kafkaesque processing change isn’t merely vindictive. It’s a huge waste of resources, for the people filling out the forms and those processing them. In fact, USCIS is going broke partly because it’s spending so many more person-hours looking for excuses to reject eligible immigrants.
But hey, cruelty and financial mismanagement? That’s practically the Trump brand.
Originally published in The Washington Post on August 6, 2020.