Battling Backlogs

On the front lines of homeland security, workers are struggling to process immigration applications more carefully, yet more quickly.

For immigrants attempting to become permanent U.S. residents, a long wait for an application to be processed can be ruinous. The more time elapses, the greater the chance an applicant will leave the country to respond to a family emergency without first obtaining permission. Without "advance parole" documents, applicants are at risk of being denied both benefits and re-entry to the United States.

Elsy Segovia, who helps immigrants in the Newark, N.J., area file for benefits, says wait times are getting shorter. The Newark office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau recently has reduced the processing time for permanent residency applications by as much as four months, says Segovia, who represents the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace and social justice advocacy group. This speedup comes as part of a nationwide push by the Homeland Security Department bureau to eliminate application backlogs by the fall of 2006. CIS assumed the service portion of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's work when that agency disbanded and its responsibilities were transferred to Homeland Security in 2003. As of mid-April, immigration officers in Newark were reviewing residency forms filed in June 2004.

The task of further reducing the turnaround time falls to Andrea Quarantillo, director of the Newark district office. Her goal is to reduce the wait to no more than six months-the target set by CIS in June 2004. At the same time, she must ensure that quality of work and employee morale don't decline.

'A Grinding Halt'

Backlogs of immigration applications are an old problem. "This is not the first backlog reduction plan I've seen. Far from it," says Crystal Williams, a spokeswoman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a Washington-based group of more than 8,000 immigration attorneys and law professors.

The latest pile of forms began accumulating in the 1990s, as beneficiaries of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act began to apply for benefits, says William Yates, associate director for operations at CIS. The law granted amnesty to about 3 million aliens who had lived in the United States illegally since at least 1982. Naturalization applications leapt from an average of 225,000 a year to more than a million annually for several years, and INS lacked the staff to handle the influx, Yates says.

Then, just as the agency got that problem under control, came Sept. 11. In the aftermath, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft asked INS to institute more stringent background checks for applicants. "Everything really came to a grinding halt while we redid our processes," Yates recalls. Now, before they can grant benefits, immigration officers must check all applicants' names against the Interagency Border Inspection System, a compilation of background information from multiple law enforcement agencies, and must wait to hear back from the FBI on fingerprint checks.

All this left a stack of more than 3 million applications that had been sitting six months or longer to welcome CIS in March 2003. The pile included nearly 600,000 applications for permanent residency and about 400,500 citizenship forms. Under the latest backlog elimination plan, CIS has vowed to fully rid itself of the old cases by the close of fiscal 2006. President Bush has asked Congress to inject more than $500 million into the effort to supplement fees that support the bulk of CIS operations.

The effort has started to pay off. The backlog of applications for permanent residency grew during the first months of CIS' existence, but peaked in December 2003 at 722,966 and has since fallen to less than 520,000. Williams, of the lawyers' association, says that while processing times haven't improved for all types of forms, she is pleased that progress in one category hasn't caused slippage in other areas. The agency has improved planning and distribution of resources, she says.

Yates attributes the successes to a combination of procedural and technological changes. For instance, CIS has decided that low-risk applicants, such as professionals who have been in the United States for three years and are applying for an extended stay with the same employer, need not undergo the full adjudication process again. The agency simply reruns background checks on them and issues an extension once the checks clear.

The Los Angeles CIS office has started sending immigrants who have lost their proof of legal residency, which is contained on a green card, or are carrying out-of-date credentials, to a support center capable of capturing the biometric information, photos and signatures needed for replacement cards. The move, which CIS would like other offices to duplicate, could reduce the wait for a replacement from a year to roughly a month.

Stuck on Security Checks

Quarantillo, who has directed the Newark district office for more than eight years, says Newark's backlog ballooned beginning in December 2002, when the requirement for national security checks took full effect. The more stringent checks have delayed roughly 5 percent of Newark's cases, she says. "Five percent of millions of cases is still a lot," she notes.

Segovia of AFSC says she has seen a fair number of cases stall, sometimes for as long as two years. Although she knows the delay is not entirely CIS' fault, she takes exception when officials tell her the law enforcement agencies running the checks are entirely to blame. Edward Shulman, chairman of the immigration lawyers group's New Jersey chapter, is sympathetic to the agency, but says a check can take from two weeks to two years. "It really becomes a problem," he adds.

Quarantillo has organized a swat team of sorts to handle background check delays. One of three security checks can be performed locally using the office's computer system, she says. For most applicants, that check comes back clean. But if not, the officer handling the case can pass it along to a three- or four-person team whose sole job is to resolve background check problems. That frees other staffers to move on to the next application.

Quarantillo also is benefiting from improved resource allocation tools. CIS headquarters has crafted a staffing analysis model to determine the optimal level of resources at each field office. After collecting data on incoming work, average time spent adjudicating each type of application and rates of approval, headquarters uses the model to suggest a plan to best allocate resources across the agency and within each office. The plan is updated every six months and already has helped CIS identify "some pretty dramatic resource shortfalls in the New York and Atlanta district offices," Yates says.

An application fee increase enacted in April 2004 will allow CIS to hire between 1,000 and 1,200 people by the end of this year, increasing its total workforce by about 600 (others are leaving due to attrition), Yates says. "I wouldn't say that [the field offices] are all adequately staffed right now, but we have made appropriate allocations," he adds.

Quarantillo says she has found the staffing blueprints helpful in determining how many employees she needs and what types of positions should be filled. In the "INS days, it was all budget-driven," she says. Headquarters officials would determine how much money was available to pay employees, and then say, " 'This is where positions should go,' " she notes. "But it wasn't as data driven. This is a real refinement on the old process."

The staffing model also helped to ensure that employees did not see drastic jumps in workload as a result of the push to eliminate backlogs, Yates says, because the plan is based on the average rate at which employees complete cases across the country.

In Newark, Quarantillo is hiring about 10 more permanent employees to bring the staff up to a large enough size to handle the caseload. She hopes to offer permanent positions to some temporary employees hired to help bring down the backlog.

Quantity or Quality

But members of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents the immigration services workers, say CIS employees across the country are overworked and are forced to choose among bad options. They can rush through cases at the risk of approving applicants who pose security concerns, work more slowly and risk poor performance ratings, or work longer days, sometimes without overtime pay, to get through the requisite number of cases with adequate care.

"We actually have officers working through lunch hour [and] taking sections of cases home because they just don't have any hope of getting cases taken care of in a day," says Charles Showalter, president of AFGE's National Homeland Security Council. At the Newark office, overtime is available, but, "Employees are being put at risk because they're being told to do more with less," says James Bonnette, a leader of the area's AFGE local.

Quarantillo, however, says CIS is more focused than ever on proper adjudication. People tended to hold INS accountable for two things: benefits denied and applications that weren't completed. "[We] rarely ever had a problem with a case we approved," she says.

Quarantillo spent 2002 monitoring application processing times and developing performance standards for both quantity and the quality of work. The resulting plan, in effect since 2003, has reduced the number of interviews employees conduct per day. That doesn't mean the workload has diminished, Quarantillo says. Instead, added security checks and quality assurance requirements mean officers must do more work per application.

Naturalization cases, for instance, are reviewed to ensure that adjudicators have "hit all the marks," she says. A quality assurance team randomly samples cases every month to check for mistakes.

There is enough leeway that officers can exceed processing times to prevent lapses in quality, Quarantillo says. But cases should be processed efficiently, she emphasizes. "You can focus on quality to the point of paralysis," she says. "What we don't want is sloppiness or inattention to details."

But in the end, the success of backlog elimination in Newark and in CIS offices across the country depends largely on factors outside the agency's grasp. Sudden policy changes can create rapid fluctuations in application levels. So far, the backlog elimination plan hasn't had to contend with such surprises.