Trump admin rejected 4,000 late DACA renewals. Some were sitting in its mailbox at the deadline

Jamil Smith? @JamilSmith 4m4 minutes ago

Several DACA recipients tried to renew. They filed their paperwork. The Trump administration saw fit to sit on it.

A mysterious mail slowdown, which the New York Times reported on last week, appears to have affected at least 74 DACA recipients in the New York City area and Chicago. But the problem may be much bigger than that.

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Trump administration (in a motion filed Tuesday in the Eastern District of New York and shared with Vox) allege that many more DACA renewal applications did arrive in a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) mailbox on October 5 — and were rejected as late anyway.

In interviews with the plaintiffs and with other immigration lawyers, Vox has confirmed at least 19 cases, at two of the three mailboxes that USCIS used to accept DACA applications, where applications were placed in the mailbox in the late afternoon or evening of October 5 but marked as “received” on October 6.

The scale of the problem indicates there are likely to be dozens or hundreds more, and that applications sitting in the mailbox on October 5 could represent a substantial portion of the 4,000 DACA renewal applications the government says it received late. (At press time, USCIS had not responded to requests for comment about specific allegations.)

Furthermore, the plaintiffs — led by the advocacy groups Make the Road New York and the National Immigration Law Center, as well as lawyers and law students from Yale Law School — allege that some applications that USCIS had received earlier were rejected for reasons the plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue are “arbitrary.” One applicant, the lawsuit alleges, got her renewal application rejected because a USCIS employee misread the date on her check.

read more: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/15/16650400/daca-renewal-deadline-rejected-lockbox-uscis