USCIS Agent Rep: Current Bill 'Rewards' Illegals Even More than Gang of Eight

On Monday, agents from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services called on Senators to oppose the new version of the immigration bill.

The union president for USCIS officers, Kenneth Palinkas, said that the “amended 1,200 page Corker-Hoeven immigration bill, if passed, will exacerbate USCIS concerns about threats to national security and public safety.”

“It will further expose the agency USCIS as inept with an already proposed massive increase in case flow that the agency is ill prepared to handle,” Palinkas said. “The bill does not address the needs of the USCIS workforce as it fails to fix the institutional problems in our agency, such as the need for newly-hired permanent employees versus term employees to perform the work, and the lack of training and manpower and manageable time to adjudicate for its current staff.”

The USCIS agents coming out against the new bill because it would, in their opinion, put American national security at risk comes on the heels of their counterparts in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doing the same.

“In its current draft, any worker in the country on a legal work visa for 10 years can get a green card, even if they overstay their visa,” he explained. “It will allow immigrants to break the law in the future and still be eligible for citizenship, as it absolves prospective behavior, not simply past mistakes.” 

“It will do away with the applicability of certain grounds of inadmissibility as contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act. It will wipe away the enforcement process that compels law breakers who overstay their visas to return to their home country and restart the immigration process,” Palinkas claimed. 

“This bill rewards immigrants who break the law, more so than the prior bill proposed by the Gang of Eight.”

Palinkas concluded by calling on U.S. senators and lawmakers to kill the current bill.

“This bill should be opposed, and reforms should be offered based on consultation with the USCIS adjudicators who actually have to implement it,” Palinkas said. “Hopefully, lawmakers will read the bill before casting their votes.”