U.S. Website Gave False Approval to Green Card Applicants — Then Blamed Glitch and Took It Away
The Intercept
theintercept.com
Summary
When Jesse Miranda, a U.S. citizen, sponsored an application for a green card for his wife nearly a year ago, he understood the process would take time. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees visas and naturalization. “What kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?” To his delight, the portal showed that their application had also been approved to move on to the next step in the process. When he called the agency’s helpline Thursday morning to confirm the approval, his suspicions proved correct. Dozens more people on Reddit and a user on an immigration-related Discord server reported experiencing the same false approval notices when they checked their application status on Wednesday and Thursday. People began to report on immigration forums on Wednesday that they’d received approval the I-130 form, but elation turned to devastation as they came to understand the notices as an error. On Thursday, the USCIS (U.S. immigration agency) site appeared to be down for a time. Wait times for the form’s approval range, on average, between 10 and 20 months. And on Track My Visa, a Discord where applicants swap advice and gripes about the immigration process, numerous users reported the same. The son of Mexican immigrants who immigrated legally and ultimately received citizenship, Miranda said he had long considered himself a Republican and felt that tough immigration policy was necessary to ensure a fair shot to people immigrating legally. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse.
From the source
When Jesse Miranda, a U.S. citizen, sponsored an application for a green card for his wife nearly a year ago, he understood the process would take time. On Wednesday, when he saw someone posting on Reddit that they had received sudden approval for a loved one’s initial application for permanent residence, he wondered if he and his wife had gotten lucky. Miranda quickly went to check the application status on the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees visas and naturalization. “What kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?” To his delight, the portal showed that their application had also been approved to move on to the next step in the process. Yet he had a nagging suspicion: Was this coming too soon? Wait times for approval of just the first step in the process can stretch more than two years, so could his wife’s application really be getting moved along so quickly? When he called the agency’s helpline Thursday morning to confirm the approval
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Published by The Intercept on theintercept.com
