ImmigrationUSCIS tries to avoid HealthCare.gov-like problems in implementing executive order

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) employees will be spending the next few months preparing for an influx of applications from undocumented immigrants seeking deferred deportation along with work permits that allow them to legally work in the United States and in some cases obtain driver’s licenses. President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) initiative on 20 November, and a day later, USCIS began to publish job postings seeking individuals to help with the rollout. Applicants who qualify for DAPA still have until May 2015 before they may apply, but immigration officials are taking a proactive approach and anticipating a large number of applications in order to avoid the mistakes made during the Obama administration’s launch of HealthCare.gov.

According to the National Journal, DAPA’s success will largely depend on how many undocumented immigrants participate in the program, how simple applicants find the process to be, and how soon they receive confirmation of their deportation deferment. “I think that if people just look at it as being caught in the bureaucratic process with no real benefit, why are they going to waste their money?” asked David Leopold, past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). “It’s really incumbent upon the government to make this work.” USCIS anticipates positive reviews of the DAPA rollout if it is anything similar to the launch of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a similar program that offered deferred deportation to undocumented immigrants who came to the United States before their sixteenth birthday. For DACA, immigration officials had roughly sixty days to prepare for its launch date after Obama announced it in June 2012. The agency trained new and existing USCIS employees, acquired additional work space, and even issued public guidance materials on how to apply for DACA. “The DACA implementation was unbelievably smooth and efficient. That was not what I would have predicted,” said Stephen Legomsky, USCIS’ chief counsel at the time.

Unlike DACA, applicants who attempted to signup on HealthCare.gov during its initial launch were met with computer errors, and long wait and processing times. “[DACA] wasn’t even in the neighborhood of the health care implementation issues,” said Crystal Williams, AILA’s executive director, “because nothing was automated; that oddly enough helped. As government programs go and certainly as immigration programs go, it was quite smooth.” To its benefit, many potential applicants for DACA waited weeks after its launch before applying; they wanted to make certain it was not a ploy to identify and deport them out of the country, but once they heard about the program’s success from friends and neighbors, they too submitted their applications. “Fortunately, I think it helped a lot that people were slow in starting to apply [to DACA] in the beginning,” Williams said. “It wasn’t like they had this huge influx the day they opened for applications.” One fault with the DACA rollout, however, was that processing times for other USCIS applications increased. Applicants applying for naturalization and spouses of citizens applying for green cards experienced longer than usual wait times.

USCIS has 180 days, which began after the 20 November announcement, to prepare for the first set of DAPA applications. “USCIS is working hard to build capacity and increase staffing to begin accepting requests and applications for upcoming initiatives,” a USCIS spokesperson wrote to the Journal. “Increasing staffing will ensure that every case received by USCIS receives a thorough review under our guidelines.”

The DACA model will serve as an example for how to administer the DAPA program, which according to many supporters, should not be compared to HealthCare.gov, which “didn’t have a chance in hell” of succeeding in the beginning, said Jim Johnson, chairman of technology research firm the Standish Group. HealthCare.gov was made more complex than it had to be, and DAPA is fundamentally a much simpler program, Johnson said. “If you narrow the scope of the project, you narrow the scope of the number of bugs you introduce. It’s just math, right?” Johnson said. “The problem with governments is they make it harder than it has to be. What you should really do is make it simpler than it has to be.”