Visa overstays and scores of backlogged citizenship applications are in many ways the real heavy lift when it comes to addressing the U.S. undocumented immigrant crisis.
But the clerks who tackle those kinds of issues – many based here in Orange County – have spent their summer fighting layoffs amid what they call union busting efforts from a Democratic presidential administration.
Standing up to protest in the heat of the sun on numerous weekdays this summer instead of going to work inside the air conditioned Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel, these clerks and their union leaders aimed to put a bit of heat of their own on the Biden Administration as well as waking up residents to their role in the immigration system.
“We don’t understand why the Biden administration, which claims to be the most pro-union in history, is allowing work to be moved from union service centers to a non-union facility in Texas,” said United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 1008 President Joel Faypon, who works at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) center in Laguna Niguel in a recent news release.
Agency officials argue the move is a key way to reduce backlogs, “part of our efforts to increase efficiency by reducing our footprint at the service centers, digitizing the process, and reducing costs.”
Today, the clerks are taking their summer protest from South Orange County to the USCIS Service Center in Tustin at 11 a.m., where workloads were recently transferred to.
In a recent news release, organizers are calling for a “halt to union-busting tactics at the hands of the federal government and USCIS, and an end to the unnecessary layoffs of 450 immigration workers in Orange County, soon to be followed by hundreds more layoffs in Nebraska and Vermont.”
In many ways, their battle reflects the complexities – and idiosyncrasies – of America’s immigration system, ironically pitting them against a Democratic presidential administration that they say is using layoffs to union bust.
It’s the same administration that recently proposed a border deal to beef up enforcement of U.S. borders, one touted by Vice President Kamala Harris in her nomination acceptance speech before the Democratic conventioneers gathered in Chicago.
Most recently, even former President Donald Trump has publicly stressed the importance of processing more immigration applications.
Yet when it comes to paying for the immigration clerks it takes to run a fair, efficient system, these workers say the administration is going cheap, shipping jobs off to Red states to avoid the strong unions Democratic officials support during national convention speeches.
Earlier this month, Congressman Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) wrote to USCIS leader, including U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Ur Jaddou, Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, questioning the agency’s move to layoff the clerks.
“As a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee, I have long highlighted the enormous case backlogs within USCIS,” Correa wrote.
“In fact, I have led numerous letters in support of more resources and funding to USCIS during the appropriations process,” Correa added. “As such, I was dismayed to hear that your agency eliminated hundreds of jobs and displaced skilled workers despite your current need to address said backlogs.”
People like Robert Holland, 58, who lives in nearby Rancho Santa Margarita, has spent nearly a decade working at the Ziggurat – as the federal building is called – processing petitions for things like asylum, citizenship, family reunification.
“We create the start of the process,” Holland told me this summer from the sidewalk along Alicia Parkway just outside the federal building.
But clerks like Holland argue the way that the USICS manages the process avoids recruiting, training and retaining the staff it takes to administer such a complicated process in a fair and efficient manner.
“We see files sit there for years,” Holland said about the results of chronic understaffing and an inability to nurture the clerks needed for such grueling work as reviewing immigration applications.
“They’re so backed up,” Holland added, “they don’t want people to know it.”
In his letter, Correa noted that “Recent data indicate that the agency’s net backlog amounted to an estimated 4,279,000 pending cases as of September 30, 2023.”
The agency keeps people as contractors, workers say, combating unionization in Laguna Niguel by instituting layoffs and sending jobs to Texas where they can use lower wage workers that aren’t represented by unions and putting the remaining workers in a nearby facility in Tustin.
In Laguna Niguel, there’s about 400 of these clerks and Holland and others say there’s been hundreds of layoffs this year.
It’s a huge loss of institutional experience in a field that can trigger lawsuits and delays because of complexities involved.
“We have tons of experience,” Holland said.
“To the government, it’s just paperwork” said Anaheim resident David Marquez, 31, who has also spent a decade commuting to the federal building in Laguna Niguel.
“But to us, every file is a person. A family.”
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