The Trump administration took another step Tuesday to cut back services to people seeking to legally enter the U.S. and focus instead on a ballooning backlog of immigration cases, announcing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would close all its international offices. The agency’s foreign operations include reuniting families, overseeing international adoptions, and processing requests for U.S. travel for humanitarian emergencies, military members serving overseas and permanent residents seeking to return. The agency, part of the Homeland Security Department, is preparing to shift its international operations to the State Department in order to focus on a backlog of immigration cases, its director, Lee Francis Cissna, said in a memo to agency employees sent out Tuesday and obtained by The Times. The State Department had no immediate comment on how it would handle the additional workload. The administration has proposed significant reductions in the department’s budget. Advertisement Cissna said in his memo that the move would maximize agency resources and help reduce backlogs, “which will ultimately assist our agency to more effectively meet its mission of fairly administering our nation’s lawful immigration system.” “Following agreement and completing of necessary wind-down procedures, we would move to close the international field offices,” he wrote. In a statement, spokeswoman Jessica Collins said the agency would “coordinate necessary inter-agency agreements to ensure no interruption in the provision of immigration services to affected applicants and petitioners.” The agency estimates that the closing of its overseas offices would save millions of dollars without disrupting operations. Alan Bersin, who served as a senior official in the Homeland Security Department during the Obama administration, said Cissna was probably focusing on tightening his budget under administration pressure. “But this is a very dramatic transformation that probably deserves a lot more study and reflection than has gone into it,” Bersin said. “It’s a closing of the door and the snuffing out of the light on the top of the Statue of Liberty.” Leon Rodriguez, who was director of the agency from 2014 to 2017, said the move represented another withdrawal of the U.S. presence abroad. “This is in line with the complete drawing down of the refugee-process capacity under the Trump administration, and that, I think, is a disaster,” Rodriguez said. “It’s a big stain on our nation that that has occurred.” Advertisement With record-high numbers of asylum seekers and a spike in Central American families at the southern border, the administration has struggled to reduce the growing immigration-case backlog in the United States. According to a database maintained by Syracuse University, 829,608 asylum cases are currently pending, with an average wait of 746 days, or more than two years. Citizenship and Immigration Services is the branch of the Homeland Security Department charged with processing immigration benefits, citizenship and, in a new focus under the Trump administration, denaturalization. At the border and across the country, agency officers interview asylum seekers to help determine whether their cases will proceed or whether they will be removed from the U.S. The latest move is one of several the administration has taken to devote more resources to processing asylum cases, sometimes at the expense of other immigration-related jobs. Advertisement For example, the agency has reassigned officers who conduct citizenship interviews to the southern border to interview asylum seekers. In the last two years, wait times for citizenship have doubled. The agency’s International Operations Division, part of the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate, has about 240 employees in the U.S and abroad, in 24 field offices in 21 countries, including in Mexico City, Moscow, Johannesburg and Beijing. Foreign nationals make up a third of all the division’s employees. In a follow-up memo on Tuesday obtained by The Times, Jennifer B. Higgins, associate director of the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate, said all future deployments abroad had been canceled, effective immediately. “There is no question that this shift will be a significant change for our directorate overall and for so many of you personally,” Higgins said. Advertisement Last year, Cissna — whose mother immigrated to the U.S. from Peru — changed the agency’s mission statement to eliminate the phrase “nation of immigrants.” He told staff the change clarified the agency’s role in “lawful immigration,” seen by some as forecasting an inward turn. “Change can be difficult and can cause consternation,” Cissna wrote in the Tuesday memo. “I want to assure you we will work to make this as smooth a transition as possible.” molly.otoole@latimes.com Twitter: @mollymotoole<doc-sep>“I believe by doing so, we will better leverage our funds to address backlogs in the United States while also leveraging existing Department of State resources at post,” he wrote. “Change can be difficult and can cause consternation. I want to assure you we will work to make this as smooth a transition as possible for each of our USCIS staff while also ensuring that those utilizing our services may continue to do so and our agency operations continue undisrupted.”<doc-sep>By Yeganeh Torbati and Mica Rosenberg WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's administration is planning to close the U.S. immigration agency's overseas locations, according to current and former officials and an internal memo, in a move affecting offices that currently handle family visa requests, international adoptions and other tasks. The move is the latest from an administration that has worked to limit both legal and illegal immigration since Trump took office in January 2017, including cuts to the U.S. refugee program and heightened vetting of U.S. visa applications. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Francis Cissna, in an email message to agency employees, announced plans for closure of the international field offices. The plans called for shifting those duties to U.S.-based agency offices and American consulates and embassies abroad. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, currently operates 23 offices overseas, scattered across Latin America, Europe and Asia, according to the agency's website. The agency offices carry out services including: helping American citizens who want to bring relatives to the United States; processing refugee applications; enabling overseas citizenship applications; and assisting Americans who want to adopt foreign children, according to its website. The international offices can also process naturalizations of U.S. military service members who are not already U.S. citizens. USCIS officers abroad also look for fraud in visa applications and provide technical immigration advice to other U.S. government officials. On Monday, senior USCIS officials told employees within its Refugee Asylum and International Operations division that the agency had decided to close its overseas posts, one current and one former official said. The closures will happen over the next year and some of the offices' tasks likely will be shifted to the State Department, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Change can be difficult and can cause consternation," Cissna wrote, but said the agency is committed to implementing "as smooth a transition as possible." In places where USCIS does not have overseas posts, the State Department already carries out some of its duties, such as replacing green cards for American legal permanent residents who have lost theirs. International USCIS staff provide support to U.S. officials who travel abroad to interview refugee applicants. 'PULLING UP THE DRAWBRIDGE' The administration has put in place new barriers for asylum seekers, barred citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States and pushed new rules that would make it harder for low-income immigrants to become legal permanent American residents. Advocates expressed concern that the move to close down overseas offices would create additional roadbocks for vulnerable applicants. "They are doing an across-the-board effort to dismantle the capacity of this country to process refugees and immigrants legally," said Mark Hetfield, president of the U.S. refugee assistance organization HIAS. "It is not consistent with what President Trump said in the State of the Union (address), which is that he wants immigrants to come here, that he wants them to come here legally." "This is another example of the administration pulling up the drawbridge," Hetfield added. Leon Rodriguez, USCIS director under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama, said the shift may have been aimed at cutting costs and that most duties now performed internationally by USCIS likely will be delegated to U.S. consulates abroad. "Symbolically it is retreating from an international presence," Rodriguez said. Agency spokeswoman Jessica Collins said by email: "As we have internally shared, USCIS is in preliminary discussions to consider shifting its international USCIS office workloads to USCIS domestic offices in the United States and, where practicable, to U.S. embassies and consulates abroad." "The goal of any such shift would be to maximize USCIS resources that could then be reallocated, in part, to backlog reduction efforts," Collins said. The agency will work closely with the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security "to ensure no interruption in the provision of immigration services to affected applicants and petitioners," Collins added. USCIS has in the past decided to close individual offices based on demand for its services. The agency previously announced that its Moscow field office will permanently close at the end of this month, citing a "significant decrease in workload." (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Bill Trott and Will Dunham)<doc-sep>
The Trump administration is preparing to trim its budget by closing down numerous immigration offices around the world, a move that will likely make it harder for foreign nationals to relocate to the United States. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will shutter nearly two dozen international field offices in the coming months “in an effort to maximize our agency’s finite resources,” according to an email from USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna that was sent to staffers on Tuesday. Services currently being performed by the nearly two dozen offices abroad will instead be transferred to domestic offices and the State Department’s consulates and embassies. A cost analysis by USCIS officials in 2018 found that a phase out of its international offices would save the agency millions per year. “I believe by doing so, we will better leverage our funds to address backlogs in the United States while also leveraging existing Department of State resources at post,” Cissna wrote in the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “Change can be difficult and can cause consternation. I want to assure you we will work to make this as smooth a transition as possible for each of our USCIS staff while also ensuring that those utilizing our services may continue to do so and our agency operations continue undisrupted.” However, immigration activists are claiming this is simply the latest move by the Trump administration to restrict immigration into the country. Closing international field offices, they argue, would slow family visa applications, refugee processing and other immigrant applications. “This is another instance of the Trump administration halting legal immigration by denying people the opportunity to file for immigration benefits in the most expedient manner,” stated immigration attorney Margaret Stock. “It’s going to smack all government employees abroad, including folks in the military, who have a foreign spouse or kids they are trying to bring to the U.S. legally.” (RELATED: ICE Officers Giving Up On Trump Over Catch And Release) The international division of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services operates in over 20 different countries. The agency’s offices perform a number of duties, such as helping potential U.S. immigrants with their applications, aiding immigrants who misplaced their green cards, and work on immigration petitions. The USCIS, however, contends that the move to shutter its international division and shift responsibilities to U.S. offices is strictly a cost-saving and streamlining measure. Follow Jason on Twitter. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.