Other News

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

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