Administration documents show that visa-related services to many American families were deliberately sidelined in 2012 because President Barack Obama’s deputies rushed to approve work permits for illegal immigrants and for companies trying to import guest workers.
Americans — including many new immigrants — who were trying get visas for their foreign spouses or to bring in foreign relatives, did not get “special emphasis” amid the extra workload caused by Obama’s legally questionable award of work permits in 2012 to roughly 800,000 younger illegal immigrants, according to the documents.
In contrast, officials fast-tracked visas to companies seeking to hire foreign blue-collar and white-collar temporary workers, foreign workers seeking approval to work in the United States, illegal immigrants who want to travel outside the country, and a few other categories.
“Pretty much everybody got bumped to the bottom of the priority lists, except for employers and illegals,” Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Caller.
Obama’s favoritism toward illegals caused harm to Americans, and that justifies a large-scale class-action suit against Obama’s immigration agencies, Vaughan said.
Vaughan cited the case of Kevin Morgan, who filed in March, 2014, to get a renewal of his immigrant wife’s residency card. By March, the agency still had not delivered the card, according to a YouTube video posted by Morgan.
The damage suffered by American families because of Obama’s legally questionable 2012 amnesty is not part of the Texas lawsuit that has temporarily blocked Obama new 2014 amnesty and his upgrade of the 2012 amnesty.
It is nor part of the lawsuit because the damaged Americans have not taken their complaints to court.
Many Americans who still waiting for family visas will be reluctant to join a lawsuit out of worry they will be secretly penalized by agency managers, she said.
But that won’t be a worry once when the American eventually get their visas, she said. They’ll be free to sue the agencies without fear of punishment, she said.
The impact of Obama’s policy was exposed by a February 2014, article in the New York Times. “Over the past year, waits for approvals of those resident visas stretched to 15 months, and more than 500,000 applications became stuck in the pipeline, playing havoc with international moves and children’s schools and keeping families apart,” said the newspaper.
Wait times rose from five months to at least 10 months.
The documents were given to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Iowa Sen. Grassley.
Grassley took the gavel at the committee following the GOP’s win in November, The committee’s panel on immigration is chaired by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.