Is the Trump Administration Slow-Walking DACA to Death?
USCIS doesn’t have to deny applications to derail lives—it can just stop deciding in a timely manner.
CLAUDIA IS TRAINING for a career in biotech, so it’s no surprise that she keeps meticulous records on her own immigration case and has the application process down to a science. Every two years, she has to apply for renewal of her protection from deportation and work permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, established by President Barack Obama in 2012. The optimal application window, she knows, opens up 180 days before her last work permit is set to expire, and starts closing when that number drops to 150. She’ll have to have the $555 application fee saved up by then; last year, she gave up her Netflix subscription, among other expenses, to make up the cost. She’ll check the form against her previous applications, all of them approved, to make sure everything is correctly entered and nothing has changed. She’ll monitor her application through the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS agency responsible for processing immigration benefits. When prompted, she’ll submit her biometric data—information the agency already has on hand from every time she’s applied before. And within a couple of months, she’ll have a new approval and new work permit in hand.
That last step, of course, is the most important—especially this spring, when she was set to begin an internship at a major biotech firm.
Claudia submitted her renewal application on December 12 of last year. Her last communication with USCIS was on January 8, when she submitted the biometrics. Since then, she has heard nothing. Her would-be employer granted her thirty days of unpaid leave, but after the thirty days, when she still didn’t have the necessary documents to be hired, they had to cancel the internship. “Everything that I’ve worked for the past four years,” she says with audible frustration, “is going to be completely ruined because of this.”
Claudia is one of many DACA recipients whose work permits have expired while waiting to hear back from USCIS about their renewals. (Like the others who spoke to me, she was willing only to have her first name published; for understandable reasons, she’s not in a mood to take risks right now.)
And DACA recipients are just some of the immigrants who have found USCIS curiously slow of late. The case backlog at USCIS has grown substantially under the second Trump administration, whose official stance is skepticism at best—and hostility at worst—toward legal and unauthorized immigrants alike.
It is impossible to know precisely how many immigrants have been affected—which is precisely the problem. USCIS is something of a black box. The only current information that is available about DACA application processing is a webpage that informs the public that “80 percent of cases are completed within 3.5 months.”
But the most recent statistics, from fall 2025—when Claudia submitted her application—certainly indicate that something strange is going on with DACA. From the last quarter of fiscal year 2025 (July–September 2025) to the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 (October–December 2025), the number of DACA renewal applications submitted to USCIS remained consistent, but the number of applications on which USCIS issued decisions fell by nearly 45 percent.
It is impossible to say for sure, from the outside, that what is happening is a deliberate effort to slow-walk immigrants’ applications to death—either by repeated vetting that sucks up employees’ time but doesn’t advance the case, or by simply assigning fewer employees to process a given type of case to begin with and letting the forms stack up. But in this administration, USCIS has repeatedly demonstrated that processing immigrants’ applications in a timely fashion—whether to approve or deny them—is not among its highest priorities. “They’re almost gleefully broadcasting that they’re taking people off their normal work” of processing applications, says Doug Rand, who was a senior adviser to the director of USCIS during the Biden administration.
U.S. CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES, unlike most government agencies, is largely not funded through congressional appropriations; rather, most of its revenue comes from the fees paid by immigrants and would-be immigrants themselves. But unlike other public agencies that are supposed to serve the people requesting their services—the DMV, for example—USCIS under this administration is very clear that its job is to serve the American people, not the noncitizens who actually pay its bills. More importantly, without the power of the purse, Congress has less power to dictate what the agency does—and has historically been content to let USCIS determine how best to allocate its resources.
For the last several years, however, backlogs at the agency have been so bad that even Congress has started demanding more information.
USCIS’s operational crisis broke out into the open in 2020, when agency leadership announced they needed $1 billion in bailout funds to break even. The budget shortfall was partly caused by the exogenous shock of the COVID pandemic—and the less-exogenous shock of the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, which included shutting down essentially all legal immigration to the United States. But USCIS had been spending more than it was taking in even before the pandemic; the Trump administration kept instituting policies that forced adjudicators to take longer scrutinizing a single case, even if the added scrutiny did nothing to affect the outcome. Approval rates didn’t change much under these policies, but the processing times did.
For the next few years, Congress sent money to USCIS to help with backlog reduction—while demanding monthly reports about the ten most commonly submitted types of immigration application (information about other applications is published on a quarterly basis). Under Biden, these reports were published the following month. As of the beginning of June, the most recent report covered January 2026. (USCIS has caught up a bit; as of June 15, the most recent data is from April.)
DACA isn’t one of the ten kinds of immigration applications analyzed in the monthly reports. But the reports demonstrate that there are some kinds of immigration applications where the number of cases being decided has fallen far behind the number of applications received.
Take applications for green cards—permanent residency—filed by people who are currently refugees or have received asylum in the United States. USCIS “paused” processing of any of those cases for a couple of months in spring 2025 (the timing is still unclear); a second “pause,” covering all applications from nationals of the 39 countries currently subject to travel bans, went into effect in December and was struck down in June by a federal judge.
But while a judge can invalidate a government memo saying no applications will be processed, that’s not the same as ensuring that processing happens at any reasonable pace. The judge can’t specify how many people are assigned to work on a given pile of papers. Even from July to September 2025, when there were no explicit pauses in effect on green card applications from refugees, USCIS approved or denied fewer than 6,000 applications—a two-thirds drop from the previous year, and less than a fifth as many as the new applications coming in.
And it’s not as if refugees’ applications for green cards are being deprioritized in favor of other green-card applications. In January–March 2026, USCIS received more cases than it completed for all four major green card types: those filed by refugees and asylees, and those based on family ties or employment.
Some USCIS employees are being given the job of reopening old cases instead of processing new ones. Under a new USCIS initiative called Operation PARRIS,1 in January, Minnesotans who had come here as refugees were detained and sent to Texas to be re-interviewed; there are no known cases of the Trump administration actually revoking anyone’s refugee status before the operation was struck down in court. And a new “Tactical Operations Unit” at USCIS has been re-evaluating green card applications; a total of fifty immigrants are at risk of having their green cards revoked due to the effort, but it is extremely probable that more than fifty applications are sitting at USCIS service centers because the employees who could evaluate them are working cold cases instead.
DACA RECIPIENTS, FOR THE MOST PART, don’t come from travel-ban countries, and they’ve been extensively vetted and screened over their decade or more in the program. (New DACA applications have not been accepted since 2017, so by definition, anyone who still has DACA is on their fourth renewal at least.) But this president already tried to end the program entirely during his first term, and under his second, ICE has proven unsettlingly willing to arrest and detain immigrants who have DACA (or similar protections from deportation) and then strip them of protection so they can be deported. A long-simmering lawsuit over DACA is expected to reach the Supreme Court next term; DACA recipients are all too aware that this next renewal could be their last.
This uncertainty is at the root of the advice to wait until six months before your existing work permit expires—apply too early, and you could deprive your future self of months of work authorization before DACA goes away for good.
Once news of extreme delays spread, though, DACA recipients started getting more worried about losing work permits now than losing them two years from now. Scroll through the r/DACA subreddit, and many of the people celebrating their renewals filed applications in April or May of this year—despite their existing work permits expiring in December or January. Those immigrants have essentially cut their next—and potentially last—renewal to eighteen months. But they got approved within weeks, even as Claudia and others who filed over the winter have heard nothing. (One post on the DACA subreddit uses a popular meme of a family at a swimming pool, in which the parent encourages one child into the water as the other one struggles for air without help; the attended child is labeled “April, May”, and the drowning one is “November, January, February, March.”)
So what hope do Claudia and the rest have? Many have gotten their members of Congress involved, though the most Congress can do on a given case is write a strongly worded letter or two. Claudia has sent in a second application for “expedited processing,” pleading severe economic hardship; it is entirely discretionary, and she has heard of plenty of cases in which the request for expedited processing is denied.
The courts are technically an option—but not a very good one. The judicial branch has no power over USCIS case decisions, and some judges interpret a delay as its own kind of decision (the decision not to decide) But the law does allow for applicants to file mandamus lawsuits to try to compel action one way or the other on their applications. In order for the judge to issue a mandamus order, however, the applicant must prove that the delay was “unreasonable”—which, without much information about how USCIS is allocating its resources, is extremely hard. The easiest thing to do is to rely on the government’s own “80 percent” completion metric, and work from the presumption that anything outside of that is unreasonable.
Adding insult to injury is that immigrants are paying more than ever for the privilege of waiting indefinitely. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress last year increased fees for several types of applications—not including DACA, but including green cards and asylum. Asylum applicants even have to pay an additional fee each year that their application remains pending, simply to stay in line; creating, perhaps, a perverse incentive to maximize revenues by processing as few applications as possible.
If Congress is going to set USCIS’s fees, it can express a little more concern with how those fees are being spent—mandating staffing data in addition to application data, perhaps. Doug Rand, the former USCIS official, notes that if Congress wanted to take more radical action—the sort of action that, he hastens to add, would probably need to be designed very carefully to avoid disastrous unintended consequences—it could simply make all immigration applications subject to the same guarantee that’s now offered to employers who pay for “premium processing” for their employees: If the application isn’t processed within a certain period of time, the agency has to refund the application fee.
If the federal government isn’t going to give Claudia the papers she needs to launch her career, she jokes, “I want my Netflix subscription back.”
Operation PARRIS, launched by USCIS early this year, stands for “Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening.”
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