The Ukraine Immigration Task Force is excited to announce a new program that hopes to increase the number of refugees admitted from other countries. The State Department just launched Welcome Corps, which represents the first major development in U.S. refugee immigration in a long time. This program will enable Americans to help thousands of people from around the world start new lives in the United States through private sponsorship.  The new program follows President Biden’s February 2021 Executive Order... Read more

The Ukraine Immigration Task Force is excited to announce the re-launch of its website to help Ukrainians fleeing war find trusted resources on U.S. immigration. The redesigned website is a collaboration with a team from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, which provided web design and development support to create the website announced today. Read more

The new final rule on the public charge ground of inadmissibility was announced on September 8, 2022. Under the final rule, a public charge is defined as "an alien who has received one or more public benefits, as defined in the rule, for more than 12 months within any 36-month period." For those not familiar with the public charge ground of inadmissibility, an alien who is likely at any time to become a public charge is generally inadmissible to the United States and ineligible to become a lawful permanent resident. Read more

Among the first priorities for many arriving under the Uniting for Ukraine program is to obtain due benefits. However, there are quite a few instances in which local SSA and other benefits-granting offices are not aware of which benefits Ukrainians are eligible for and how to administer those benefits to recent arrivals. For example, we have heard of situations in which health insurance providers want a Social Security Number, but the local SSA office informs people that they cannot issue an SSN before applicants receive an Employment Authorization Document (EAD). Or, some SSA offices don’t want to issue a non-working SSN in states where Ukrainians are eligible to receive certain benefits without having an SSN (for example, in New York State).  For the purposes of obtaining benefits, all family members can apply for non-working SSN at their local SSA local office. If they are applying for Medicaid, they should be able to get a letter from the benefits-granting agency stating they need an SSN in order to be able to process their Medicaid application. They can take that letter to the SSA, which should then issue them a non-working SSN. The SSA offices can confirm these provisions directly in their Program Operations Manual, found at  https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0110211195 and https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0110211600 It also helps to come to the SSA with a form from […] Read more

A new article about our Ukraine Immigration Task Force was just published in the NYSBA journal! Read it at https://nysba.org/nysbas–ukraine-task-force-leads-to-new-national-ukrainian-immigration-task-force/ Read more

Today’s article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Welcome to come, but not to work: Ukrainians fleeing war can’t get job permits in the U.S., highlights a critical problem facing hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals to the United States: the lack of ability to work legally. This is not only a crisis for Ukrainians — it is a major problem for Afghans and others seeking refuge in the United States from war, violence, and persecution in numerous countries.  Ukrainians, Afghans, and over a million others face a processing delay of 8-13 months for employment authorization, thanks to an unprecedented backlog of work permit applications. Bloomberg Law reported in May that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had more than 1.5 million pending applications for Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) according to data released for the first quarter of fiscal year 2022. That’s only a portion of the 5.2 million total applications in the USCIS processing queue as of June 2022, a figure released by the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman in her annual report to Congress. This issue goes beyond the obvious economic impact of not being able to provide shelter and necessities for oneself and one’s children and/or elderly parents. This issue puts countless vulnerable individuals and families in communities across America at risk for exploitation, victimization, domestic […] Read more