Over 100,000 people are waiting to become citizens ahead of November’s elections. A July swearing-in ceremony in Santa Ana, Calif., for new citizens.
Photo: Mindy Schauer/Zuma PressThe House on Saturday unanimously passed a bill to provide emergency funding to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the primary agency running the nation’s immigration system that is set to furlough roughly two-thirds of its employees at the end of this month.
The bill passed moments after the House voted on legislation to prevent cutbacks at the U.S. Postal Service, which brought members of Congress back to Washington for a rare Saturday session. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) brought up the bill using a procedure known as unanimous consent, which allows bills to bypass roll-call votes so long as no lawmakers object.
Pressure has been mounting through the week to shore up USCIS, the agency that handles citizenship, green-card, visa and other immigration applications.
The agency plans to furlough about 70% of its staff on Aug. 31, and should the furlough move ahead, most of the agency’s work is expected to come to a halt. That could potentially prevent more than 100,000 people waiting to take their citizenship oaths from becoming citizens ahead of November’s elections.
In a written statement, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.), the bill’s sponsor, said the legislation should spur the Trump administration to delay its planned furloughs, which would affect about 13,400 employees.
The bill’s path in the Senate wasn’t immediately clear. Though that chamber won’t return until September, any senator can bring up the bill using another unanimous-consent request. Spokesmen for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and the White House didn’t return requests for comment.
Lawmakers in both parties have asked the agency’s leadership and that of its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, to delay the furloughs in light of the improving budget outlook at USCIS. Unlike nearly all other federal agencies, USCIS funds itself through the fees it charges for citizenship and other immigration applications.
USCIS initially said in May that furloughs would be necessary—after a precipitous drop in immigration applications because of the coronavirus pandemic—unless Congress passed a $1.2 billion infusion to shore up the agency’s finances. Since then, the agency has brought in $800 million more than expected, and internal projections seen by congressional aides from both parties show that even without furloughs, USCIS is expected to be solvent through at least November.
Agency leadership agreed to delay the furloughs from the start of August to the end of the month to give Congress time to provide the agency emergency funding as part of a Covid-19 relief package. Talks on that package fell apart, but congressional leaders from both parties have told agency leadership they were committed to including the money in must-pass legislation in September, lawmakers and aides said.
Still, top officials at DHS took Congress’s failure to pass coronavirus relief as a sign that Congress might not come through with the commitment in time, and they believe immediate furloughs are still the fiscally responsible route, according to three DHS officials involved in conversations regarding the potential furloughs. They have privately projected that suspending pay for more than 13,000 employees over eight weeks would save the agency about $330 million.
Members of Congress—both Democrats and Republicans—have pushed back, telling USCIS and DHS leadership that the furloughs would harm the economy, both by forcing thousands of employees across the country to apply for unemployment and preventing immigrants from receiving work permits.
“You can’t turn the switch on and off at an agency like this. You’re going to have a backlog of legal immigration cases, a backlog at the border,” Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R., Neb.), who has about a thousand USCIS employees working in his district, said in an interview. “I don’t want to see any of that happen.”
On Friday evening, a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers sent acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Joe Edlow, USCIS’s head, a letter asking them to put off the furloughs.
“USCIS’s improved financial position and the continued efforts by Congress to ensure the agency’s operational continuity warrant a further delay in furloughs,” the group wrote.
A different bipartisan group of House lawmakers, also on Friday, introduced the stopgap bill that passed Saturday. It doesn’t provide the $1.2 billion the government asked for; rather, it increases the fees some companies pay for faster processing of visa applications.
Write to Michelle Hackman at Michelle.Hackman@wsj.com
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