Former deputy ombudsman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Luke Bellocchi, testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on how President Obama's plan to grant amnesty and work permits to millions of illegal aliens would affect the agency. Bellocci testified that it's "hard to imagine" the agency could handle the surge in new applications created by President Obama's executive actions.
Bellocchi describe the process as being based primarily on paper applications and postal mail and that USCIS would most likely have to divert "massive resources" from other immigration applications to process the expected 4.5 million applications that will be arriving in the coming months.
"The administration has informed this committee that it plans to hire 1,000 new workers" to process the applications, Bellocchi said, but "questions immediately surface whether this number will be sufficient without creating extreme backlogs."
He indicated that the new workers would have to process and adjudicate 4,500 applications each during the six-month target period.
"Including weekends, that would mean 25 to 27 applications per day for 1,000 adjudicators."
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