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Tag: u.s. citizenship

  • After National Guard shooting, administration cracks down on legal immigration

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    WASHINGTON — Sophia Nyazi’s husband, Milad, shook her awake at 8 a.m. “ICE is here,” he told her.

    Three uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were downstairs at the family’s home on Long Island, N.Y., on Tuesday, according to a video reviewed by The Times that she captured from atop the staircase.

    Nyazi said the agents asked whether her husband was applying for a green card. They told her they would have to detain him because of the shooting of two National Guard members a week earlier in Washington, D.C.

    “He has nothing to do with that shooting,” Nyazi, 27, recalled answering. “We don’t even know that person.”

    Her protests didn’t matter. The Trump administration has put into motion a broad and unprecedented set of policy changes aimed at substantially limiting legal immigration avenues, including for immigrants long considered the most vulnerable.

    Unfortunately, I think the administration took this one very tragic incident and politicized it as a way to shut down even legal immigration

    — Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

    Milad Nyazi, 28, was detained because, like the man charged in the shooting which left one National Guard member dead, he is from Afghanistan.

    The administration has paused decisions on all applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, by people seeking asylum. The visa and immigration applications of Afghans, whom the U.S. had welcomed in 2021 as it pulled all troops from the country, have been halted.

    Officials also froze the processing of immigration cases of people from 19 countries the administration considers “high-risk” and will conduct case-by-case reviews of green cards and other immigration benefits given to people from those countries since former President Biden took office in 2021.

    Immigration lawyers say they learned that dozens of naturalization ceremonies and interviews for green cards are being canceled for immigrants from Haiti, Iran, Guinea and other countries on the list.

    In a couple of cases, immigration officers told immigrants that they had been prepared to grant a green card, but were unable to do so because of the new guidance, said Gregory Chen, government relations director at American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

    Although it is unclear exactly how many people could be affected by the new rules, 1.5 million immigrants have asylum cases pending with USCIS.

    “These are sweeping changes that exact collective punishment on a wide swath of people who are trying to do things the right way,” said Amanda Baran, former chief of policy and strategy at USCIS under the Biden administration. “I worry about all the people who have dutifully filed applications and whose lives are now on hold.”

    Administration officials called the Nov. 26 shooting a “terrorist attack” and defended the changes as necessary to protect the country. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, faces charges stemming from the shooting that killed Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounded Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24.

    “The protection of this country and of the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration’s reckless resettlement policies,” Joseph Edlow, director of USCIS, said in a message posted Nov. 27 on X. “American safety is non-negotiable.”

    Lakanwal pleaded not guilty last week and his motive remains under investigation. In Afghanistan, he served in a counterterrorism unit operated by the CIA.

    Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 through a Biden administration program that resettled nearly 200,000 Afghans in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, officials said. He applied for asylum in December 2024 and it was approved under the Trump administration in April, according to a statement by the nonprofit #AfghanEvac.

    Afghans who worked with U.S. troops were believed to face danger if left behind under the Taliban-run government. Along with undergoing routine security screening, they submitted to additional “rigorous” vetting, which included biometric and biographic checks by counterterrorism and intelligence professionals, the Department of Homeland Security said at the time.

    Two federal reports from 2024 and this year pointed to some failings of the screening, including data inaccuracies and the presence of 55 evacuees who were later identified on terrorism watch lists, though the latter report noted that the FBI had then followed all required processes to mitigate any potential threat.

    It’s unclear exactly how the administration will carry out reviews of thousands of people who already live legally in the U.S. The federal government can’t easily strip people of permanent legal status. The threat of reopening cases, however, has sparked alarm in immigrant communities across the country.

    About 58,600 Afghan immigrants call California home as of 2023, far more than any other state, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Interviews with a dozen local community advocates, immigration attorneys and family members of those detained paint an aggressive effort by the federal government to round up recent Afghan immigrants in the wake of the D.C. shooting.

    “Unfortunately, I think the administration took this one very tragic incident and politicized it as a way to shut down even legal immigration. And it’s definitely gone much broader than the Afghan community,” said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, the director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

    Trump administration officials cited the shooting in a spate of policy changes last week.

    On Friday, USCIS announced it had established a new center to strengthen screening with supplemental reviews of immigration applications, in part using artificial intelligence. The USCIS Vetting Center, based in Atlanta, will “centralize enhanced vetting of aliens and allow the agency to respond more nimbly to changes in a shifting threat landscape,” the agency said.

    On Thursday, USCIS said work permits granted to immigrants would expire after 18 months, not five years. The change includes work permits for those admitted as refugees, with pending green card applications and with pending asylum applications.

    In a memorandum Tuesday outlining the pause on asylum applications and the immigration cases of people from the 19 countries also subject to a travel ban, USCIS acknowledged that the changes could result in processing delays but had determined it was “necessary and appropriate” when weighed “against the agency’s obligation to protect and preserve national security.”

    Immigrants already had been on high alert as the Trump administration canceled temporary humanitarian programs, cut back refugee admissions — except for a limited number of white South African Afrikaners — and increased attempts to send those with deportation orders to countries where they have no personal connection.

    Before the Washington shooting, a Nov. 21 memo showed that the administration planned to review the cases of more than 200,000 refugees admitted under the Biden administration. Although asylum seekers apply after arriving in the U.S., refugees apply for admission from outside the country.

    Nyazi questioned why Afghans are being singled out, noting that a white person allegedly assassinated Charlie Kirk, but “I don’t see any ICE agents going into white people’s houses.”

    Asked why Milad Nyazi was detained, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant public affairs secretary for Homeland Security, called him a criminal, citing two arrests on suspicion of domestic violence.

    “Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem, DHS has been going full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and criminal illegal aliens that came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs and working to get the criminals and public safety threats OUT of our country,” McLaughlin said in a statement.

    Nyazi said the charges, which did not stem from incidents of physical violence, were dropped and his record was later expunged.

    She and her husband got engaged in 2019 in Afghanistan and applied for a fiance visa, because Nyazi is a U.S. citizen. Their application was approved in 2021. Soon after, with the Taliban takeover in full force, the U.S. government allowed Milad Nyazi to fly to the U.S. He has a pending green card application, Nyazi said.

    On Tuesday, the couple’s 3-year-old daughter screamed and cried as her father was handcuffed and taken away. He has a court hearing this week.

    Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and others say Afghans in various stages of their legal immigration process — not only those with deportation orders — have been targeted. She said at least 17 Afghans in the Bay Area have been detained since Monday.

    Lawyers said many of the Afghans detained last week had arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they had sought asylum.

    Paris Etemadi Scott, legal director of the Pars Equality Center in San José, said three of her clients, an Afghan mother and her two sons who are both in their early 20s, were detained Dec. 1 during a routine check-in with ICE. All have pending asylum applications, she said.

    Rebecca Olszewski, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said her Afghan client, who also has a pending asylum case, reported for his monthly virtual check-in Friday and was told to show up in person the next day, where he was detained.

    Since the shooting, administration officials and the president have used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants. In announcing the 19-country travel ban Dec. 1, Noem posted on X that she was recommending a “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

    In a Cabinet meeting the next day, Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” who “contribute nothing.” (A few days later, Noem said the administration would expand the travel ban to more than 30 countries.)

    On Thanksgiving Day, Trump had said on his social media platform that he intends to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and deport those who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

    In recent days, a ghostly quiet has overtaken Shafiullah Hotak’s regular haunts in North Sacramento, where the Afghan population in the city is especially dense. Hotak, 38, is an Afghan immigrant who served as a program manager at refugee resettlement organization Lao Family Community Development until layoffs due to federal cuts forced him out of work in May.

    On Thursday, immigration agents banged on doors at an apartment complex on Marconi Avenue, where hundreds of Afghans have resettled. Just one employee sat in an Afghan-owned tax and bookkeeping business that was typically buzzing with clients. A nearby park, where teenagers kick around soccer balls and giggling packs of children roam after school, was empty. And the lines at a halal market known for its sesame-topped Afghan bread had disappeared.

    “The situation we have in our community reminds me of when we used to go to work in Afghanistan,” Hotak said. “We had to take different routes every day because people who were against the U.S. mission in Afghanistan were targeting people. There were bombings and shootings.”

    Hotak said “Kill the eyes,” is what the enemies of the U.S. in Afghanistan used to advise as to how to deal with local Afghans aiding the military, in order to blind their operations.

    “But nowadays those ‘eyes’ are here in the U.S. and the U.S. government is looking to pick them up and put them in jail,” Hotak said.

    Times staff writers Castillo reported from Washington and Hussain and Uranga from Los Angeles.

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    Suhauna Hussain, Andrea Castillo, Rachel Uranga

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  • Trump administration moves to make U.S. citizenship harder with revised civics test

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    The Trump administration moved again Wednesday to make it harder to gain U.S. citizenship, announcing a slate of changes to the core civics test that immigrants must pass to be naturalized.

    The changes would expand the number of questions immigrants need to be prepared to answer, and increase the number of questions they must answer correctly in order to pass.

    The changes, announced as pending in the Federal Register, would largely revert the test to a similarly longer and harder version that was introduced in 2020 during President Trump’s first term, but was swiftly rolled back under President Biden in 2021.

    The shift follows other Trump administration changes to the process by which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials determine whether prospective citizens are qualified, including enhanced assessments of their “moral character” and whether they ascribe to any “anti-American” beliefs, and intense checks into their community ties and social media networks.

    It also comes amid a broader crackdown on undocumented immigration, and what Trump has said will be the largest “mass deportation” in U.S. history. That effort has been heavily centered in the Los Angeles region, to the consternation of many Democratic leaders and immigration advocacy organizations.

    The new naturalization test, like the short-lived 2020 version, would draw from 128 possible questions and require prospective citizens to answer 12 out of 20 questions correctly in order to pass. Under the current test, which dates to 2008, there are 100 possible questions, and prospective citizens must answer six out of 10 correctly.

    Trump administration officials said the new test “will better assess an alien’s understanding of U.S. history, government, and English language,” and is part of a “multi-step overhaul” of the citizenship process that will ensure traditional American culture and values are protected.

    “We are doing everything in our power to make sure that anyone who is offered the privilege of becoming an American citizen fulfills their obligation to their new country,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

    Immigration advocates cast the change as an attempt by the administration to further impede the legal pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants already deeply rooted in the U.S. They say it is part of a broader, authoritarian campaign by Trump and his administration to vet potential new citizens and other legal immigrants for conservative ideology and loyalty to him — all while the administration aggressively targets people for deportation based on little more than the color of their skin and the work that they do.

    “The Trump administration lauding the privileges of becoming a U.S. citizen — while making it harder to obtain it — rings hollow when you consider that it is also arguing before the Supreme Court that law enforcement can racially profile Latines,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “All this does is make it harder for longtime residents who contribute to this country every day to finally achieve the permanent protections that only U.S. citizenship can offer.”

    Earlier this month, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in a case challenging immigration raids in California that immigration agents may stop and detain people they suspect are in the U.S. illegally based on little more than the color of their skin, their speaking Spanish and their working in fields or locations with large immigrant workforces.

    Last month, USCIS announced that it was ramping up its vetting of immigrants’ social media activity and looking for “anti-American ideologies or activities,” including “antisemitic ideologies.” That announcement followed months of enforcement against pro-Palestinian student activists and other U.S. visa and green card holders that raised alarms among constitutional scholars and free speech advocates.

    Trump administration officials have rejected such concerns, and others about raids sweeping up people without criminal records and racial profiling being used to target them, as part of a misguided effort by liberals and progressives to protect even dangerous, undocumented immigrants for political reasons.

    In announcing the latest change to the naturalization test, Homeland Security said it would make the test more difficult, and in the process ensure that “only those who are truly committed to the American way of life are admitted as citizens.”

    The department also lauded its recent moves to more deeply vet prospective citizens, saying the new process “includes reinstating neighborhood interviews of potential new citizens, considering whether aliens have made positive contributions to their communities, determining good moral character, and verifying they have never unlawfully registered to vote or unlawfully attempted to vote in an American election.”

    In rolling back the first Trump administration’s test — which is very similar to the newly proposed one — USCIS officials under the Biden administration said that it “may inadvertently create potential barriers to the naturalization process.”

    By contrast, the agency under Biden said the 2008 test — the one Trump is now replacing again — was “thoroughly developed over a multi-year period with the input of more than 150 organizations, which included English as a second language experts, educators, and historians, and was piloted before its implementation.”

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    Kevin Rector

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  • Medi-Cal will soon be open to all, 'papers or no papers.' She wants her neighbors to know

    Medi-Cal will soon be open to all, 'papers or no papers.' She wants her neighbors to know

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    As parents hustled to pick up their kids from a school in South Los Angeles, Juana Dominguez greeted one after another with the same question in Spanish: “Do you have Medi-Cal?”

    “Don’t be afraid to get it,” she urged mothers pushing strollers in the afternoon sun. She paused to chat up street vendors hawking raspados and hot dogs, encouraging them as well, as she handed out fliers.

    Many already knew Dominguez from the brightly painted Paloma Market nearby, where she can regularly be found selling tacos at a table out front. On this stretch of Main Street, she also dishes out health information through a program that turns vendors into “community messengers.”

    Dominguez is on a mission to make sure her neighbors know that “papers or no papers, you’re going to get help from Medi-Cal.” That’s because in January, the state will open its Medicaid program to anyone whose income is low enough to qualify, no matter their immigration status.

    It’s the culmination of a steady expansion of the California health insurance program, which has already grown to include children, young adults and seniors regardless of their legal status. As of last year, the uninsured rate among immigrants in California without U.S. citizenship was estimated to be 21% — lower than in 36 other states, according to a KFF analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

    Next year, California will extend Medi-Cal benefits to the last remaining group of undocumented people — those ages 26 to 49 — in what is expected to be its biggest expansion of coverage since key provisions in the Affordable Care Act were implemented in 2014. State officials have estimated that more than 700,000 people will be eligible to gain “full scope” coverage for the first time, helping them access important services such as preventative care and treatment for chronic conditions.

    Juana Dominguez hands out information about Medi-Cal in South Los Angeles. The government health insurance program gears up for an upcoming expansion to serve eligible people of all ages regardless of immigration status.

    (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

    Dominguez wants people to be aware of the opportunity, and to make use of their new coverage. In California, people who lack valid visas, green cards or U.S. citizenship have been less likely than other immigrants to go to the doctor, with 29% saying they had never gotten or tried to get medical care in the U.S., a KFF/L.A. Times survey this year found.

    Fear is rampant in the community, Dominguez said, as people worry that signing up for or using such benefits could jeopardize their chances of getting a green card or citizenship. Under the “public charge” rule, people can be blocked from legal status if they are likely to become “primarily dependent” on government aid.

    Medi-Cal benefits do not factor into those decisions except in cases involving long-term stays in mental health or nursing institutions, advocates said. As Dominguez made her rounds on Main Street, she repeatedly reassured people: “It’s not a public charge for the government.”

    Dozens of vendors such as Dominguez have been talking up Medi-Cal as part of an unusual program that mobilizes street vendors around public health issues that are important to them. The program, run by the community health network AltaMed in partnership with the nonprofit Inclusive Action for the City, launched nearly two years ago and provides vendors a quarterly stipend for their efforts.

    The street vendors “identified that their community members are undocumented people who have been historically excluded from all healthcare systems,” said Rosa Vazquez, manager for community mobilizing for the AltaMed Institute for Health Equity. Their biggest goal has been ensuring the people they reach get information “so that they can make the best choices for their own health.”

    This year, that “has meant a particular focus on Medi-Cal expansion,” Vazquez said.

    Rosa Vazquez talks with vendors Aurora Alejo and Juana Dominguez during a training for street vendors on Medi-Cal expansion.

    Rosa Vazquez, right, talks with Aurora Alejo, left, and Juana Dominguez during a training for street vendors by the AltaMed Institute for Health Equity.

    (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

    In November, the vendors gathered at a Boyle Heights office to learn about the state effort. Vazquez laid out details about income limits for the program, what it would cover, and how people could apply.

    In the KFF/L.A. Times survey, more than a third of California immigrants who are probably undocumented — those who said they did not have valid visas, green cards or citizenship — said they steered clear of public programs that help pay for food, housing or healthcare because they didn’t want to draw attention to their own immigration status or that of a family member.

    The survey also found that 70% were unsure if using such programs could decrease their chances of getting a green card, while another 16% believed that it would.

    Under the Trump administration, a new rule added Medicaid to the list of assistance programs that could factor into public charge determinations. The rule was challenged in court and President Biden officially removed it shortly after taking office, but apprehension has remained.

    Sarah Dar, a policy director with the California Immigrant Policy Center, said that “especially under the previous presidential administration, there was a message being sent to these communities that you’re not deserving of public benefits and you shouldn’t access services.”

    For the Medi-Cal program to “all of a sudden be available to people, it’s going to take really trusted messengers to reach these folks,” she said during a November webinar hosted by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute and the California Endowment.

    In Fresno, those trusted messengers could include Centro La Familia Advocacy Services, a nonprofit founded more than half a century ago to help immigrants apply for government programs that had forms only in English. The nonprofit will be extending its hours on Saturdays to accommodate farmworkers, who often can’t make it to their centers during the week, as well as sharing information on Spanish-language Univision and heading directly to the fields to meet workers.

    “It is still difficult” for many immigrants who lack the literacy skills to navigate Medi-Cal paperwork, even when translated into Spanish, said its executive director, Margarita Rocha.

    TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant advocacy organization, provides similar outreach in the Inland Empire. Farmworkers there “don’t come to government institutions for aid because of the fear,” said Luz Gallegos, the group’s executive director. “We have to go to them.”

    Gallegos said TODEC has been trying to raise awareness about Medi-Cal for years, starting with the first expansion that covered children regardless of immigration status. It has recruited farmworkers who signed up for coverage for themselves or their kids to encourage others to apply. Now these volunteers show off their Medi-Cal cards and share stories about how they benefited from the program.

    The group has also brought Riverside and San Bernardino county officials out to work sites to register farmworkers for Medi-Cal, with its own volunteers on hand to help establish trust.

    And in Mendocino County, workers at Anderson Valley Health Center in Boonville have been heading out to local vineyards, asking companies to tuck informational fliers alongside pay stubs, and phoning uninsured patients to let them know about the upcoming expansion.

    “This group is probably the hardest” to reach compared with those who have gotten Medi-Cal so far, said Chloe Guazzone, executive director of the health center. As patients, “they don’t tend to come to us unless there’s an urgent issue because they’re uninsured,” she said, “so finding them in the first place” can be difficult.

    In Los Angeles, Dominguez said she was motivated to bring information to her community by the death of her friend Angel Vasquez, a kindly jokester who lived near Paloma Market.

    When Vasquez got COVID-19 the first winter of the pandemic, he held off on calling for an ambulance, Dominguez said. She says she believes he was worried about the cost. His son, also named Angel Vasquez, said family members in Guatemala told the man to go to the hospital, but Vasquez initially insisted it was just a fever.

    “He went to the hospital very late — I think too late,” his son said.

    Juana Dominguez hands out information about Medi-Cal along Main Street in South Los Angeles.

    Juana Dominguez hands out information about Medi-Cal along Main Street in South Los Angeles.

    (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

    Vasquez died in May 2021 at the age of 55, his son said. Dominguez was haunted by the thought that if he had gone to the hospital sooner, her friend might have lived.

    “My kids miss him a lot,” she said.

    As she finished up her rounds on Main Street, she paused to point out where Vasquez had once lived. When she had the opportunity to reach out to neighbors about Medi-Cal, “I thought, ‘Juana, your community needs this information.’ … This gives me the drive to persist with it.”

    California officials have estimated that more than 700,000 people will be able to transition from “restricted scope” to “full scope” Medi-Cal next year. Being in “restricted scope,” which helps reimburse hospitals for emergency care, means “they’re in the system, we know who they are … we know that they’re income-eligible for Medi-Cal,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of the healthcare consumer advocacy group Health Access California.

    “It is an incredibly useful way to automatically enroll” people who will now gain coverage for a range of care needed beyond the emergency room, Wright said. “We’re really glad the state has taken efforts to try to do this as automatically and seamlessly as possible.”

    California’s Department of Health Care Services said it’s unknown how many people who aren’t already in the “restricted scope” program will be newly eligible for Medi-Cal. The state has budgeted $1.4 billion for the expansion this fiscal year and $3.4 billion annually when it is fully implemented.

    Researchers at UC Berkeley and UCLA estimate that among Californians under the age of 65, the Medi-Cal expansion will reduce the uninsured rate among immigrants without legal status from 58.4% to 27.8%. Despite that sharp reduction, it would still remain far higher than the estimated uninsured rate of 7% for all Californians in that age group.

    Experts said hundreds of thousands of immigrants will remain uninsured because they make too much money to qualify for Medi-Cal, but don’t have affordable coverage through their employers.

    Wright said people in that situation can buy health insurance on their own, “but then the question is, is it accessible? Is it affordable? Is it administratively easy?”

    Those without legal status will remain ineligible for financial assistance to buy health coverage through Covered California, the state marketplace for insurance coverage. He and other advocates are now pushing the state to come up with an option to help them as well.

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    Emily Alpert Reyes, Melissa Gomez, Priscella Vega

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  • Is ’90 Day Fiancé’ having an effect on visa approvals? A new report argues it is

    Is ’90 Day Fiancé’ having an effect on visa approvals? A new report argues it is

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    WASHINGTON, D.C. — 

    Since it first aired in 2014, TLC’s “90 Day Fiancé” has shown viewers the complexities of long-distance, international romances between U.S. citizens and people from foreign countries. But as the reality TV series has grown in popularity over the last decade, the approval rate for fiancé visas has dropped.

    Those things could be linked, according to a report released Monday by Boundless Immigration, a tech company that helps people navigate immigration processes. The organization is looking into the ways in which the series might be affecting regular visa applicants, and says that while the show raised awareness about the visa process, it may have led to increased scrutiny of applications.

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, however, said there isn’t any correlation between the show and the approval process.

    “Requests for immigration benefits are not determined based on television entertainment or other forms of media content,” spokesman Matthew Bourke said.

    “USCIS adjudicators individually evaluate every request for immigration benefits fairly, humanely and efficiently before issuing a determination,” Bourke said.

    Viewership for “90 Day Fiancé” has steadily increased since the show launched in 2014, according to the report. Meanwhile, the approval rate for fiancé visas dropped nearly by a quarter, from 87% in fiscal year 2015 to 63% in 2022, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

    Before the show started, the approval rate was 75% in 2013. Data through the third quarter of this fiscal year show a 75% approval rate of applications processed so far. Still, Boundless Immigration said, the drop after “90 Day Fiancé” began airing is worth continuing to examine.

    “The vast majority of Americans and even members of Congress would agree that keeping people in purgatory or keeping families from starting their lives together is probably not the best way of operating for the country,” said Boundless Immigration’s chief executive Xiao Wang, adding that the company has had clients who were featured on the show.

    Representatives for TLC did not respond to requests for comment.

    The K-1 visa is designed to reunite U.S. citizens with their foreign fiancés, giving them 90 days to get married before the visa expires.

    But as with all immigration processes, the pandemic caused significant delays for fiancé visas. Early this year, the average processing time for the I-129F petition by the U.S. citizen fiancé for their foreign partner — a critical step in the visa process — ballooned to 21 months from seven months, according to the report.

    On an episode of “90 Fiancé: Before the 90 Days,” participant Gino Palazzolo lamented how difficult it was leaving his partner, Jasmine Pineda, after he proposed to her in Panama.

    “As soon as I got home, I filed the K-1 visa to bring Jasmine to the United States,” Palazzolo says on the episode. “But, you know, it’s taken a long time to process. We’re at, like, 12 months. So that makes Jasmine frustrated, because she wants to be with me now, and it causes friction between us.”

    Though the show hasn’t led to an increase in fiancé visa applications, the backlog of applications waiting to be processed has more than doubled since before the pandemic to 51,500, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

    Although visa issuances have risen since 2020, they are still nowhere near pre-pandemic levels, according to the report. Fiancé visas make up less than half a percent of all yearly non-immigrant visa admissions.

    Bourke of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the agency recently implemented changes to reduce the backlog of fiancé visa cases after the pandemic caused an agency-wide hiring freeze. Appropriations by Congress last year have been critical to reducing the backlog, he said, and proposed application fee increases would also help.

    California is among the most common states for fiancé visa holders, as well as Texas, Florida and New York, according to the report.

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    Andrea Castillo

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