Why does U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services keep insisting on making more work for itself?
This is mostly a rhetorical question. The Trump administration almost certainly doesn’t mind.
Last week, the administration unveiled the third in its trio of new regulations to make work permits harder to apply for and make people apply for them more often. Both of those things create more work for USCIS adjudicators, who will now need more time to scrutinize applications and have more applications to scrutinize.
More work for USCIS means a bigger case backlog — which was already huge before Trump took office and has only gotten worse from there, with 11.6 million pending applications as of September 2025. But that’s either not a concern for the administration, or, perhaps, something they view as an added benefit.
First, in October, USCIS published an interim final rule. That is, a regulation that can go into effect without needing a public-comment phase first. The rule ended the practice of automatically extending someone’s work permit while they waited for their renewal to be approved. Since even a lapse of a day or two between one work permit expiring and a new one being issued can force someone out of a job, automatic extension was the only reason that countless immigrants were able to remain in the workforce as USCIS backlogs increased. (Indeed, the Biden administration was so snowed under with work permit applications that it had to increase the length of the auto-extension from 6 months to 18 months.)
Automatic extensions began in 2016, but even before that, USCIS had a way to help people bridge a work-permit gap: If it was taking more than 90 days to process a renewal application, the agency would automatically issue an “interim” work permit to cover the applicant for the next several months. The Trump administration isn’t giving people that option, either.
The backlogs haven’t improved. As of February 2026 — which, somehow, is the most recent data we have, despite Congress mandating monthly updates on work permit backlogs — two-thirds of work permit applications had been pending for more than 6 months. That’s especially difficult for people whose work permits are only valid for a year at a time – which Congress mandated for some immigrants last summer. Now, if you don’t manage to apply for your renewal early enough — and keep your fingers crossed that you’ll get to the front of the line before your current work permit expires — you’re out of luck.
The other two new regulations have not gone into effect yet as they were posted for public comment, which the administration is required to consider and respond to (though it’s not required to actually make any changes to the regulation based on the comments).
The first, which USCIS posted for comment in February, targets work permits for asylum applicants. We covered one aspect of that regulation here at the Throughline: the provision that allows USCIS to stop processing all work permits for asylum-seekers if the backlog on asylum applications stretches beyond 6 months – which it has been for the past decade or so. (As of September 2025, it would take the agency over 3 years to clear its asylum backlog.) But, in the apparently-unlikely event that USCIS does keep issuing work permits to asylum seekers, the timeline would change, forcing asylum seekers to wait much longer than they currently do to get a work permit in hand — one year, instead of the current waiting period of six months.
Also Read: The Throughline: Is Trump’s Gold Card an Immigration Golden Ticket?
The second proposed regulation shortens the amount of time that some work permits would be valid: making work permits for people with deferred action, for example, valid for only one year instead of two. Immigrants with Temporary Protected Status or who had been paroled into the United States had already had their work permit validity shortened to one year by Congress, and the administration has started issuing work permits that are valid for only 18 months (instead of five years) to refugees, asylees, and applicants for asylum or green cards. Furthermore, the regulation gives USCIS the power to change how long a period to issue work permits for, without having to issue another regulation.
So, taking the three together, an asylum seeker would have to fill out the asylum application and submit it, wait a year (paying an additional backlog fee on the application), apply for a work permit, and wait around 6 months for USCIS to process it. Then they’d have to apply for their renewal a few months after getting the initial work permit to make sure that–in a world where most applications remain pending for more than 6 months, and work permits are only valid for 18 months at a time–their work permit didn’t expire while they were waiting for the renewal. And if they applied too late, or if USCIS slowed down too much, and there was a gap, the agency couldn’t do anything to bridge it — no automatic extension, no interim work permit.
There are also additional restrictions proposed on who’s allowed to get work permits at all. The new proposed regulation prohibits anyone from getting a “discretionary” work permit if they have ever been arrested for a crime — and explicitly says that if they are convicted, they remain ineligible even if the conviction is expunged.
It is awfully easy to imagine how this provision could be abused by a particularly enterprising and particularly cruel police department: targeting immigrant communities for minor offenses, then telling USCIS that they should be kicked out of the legal workforce as a result of the arrest. Nor can work permits be issued to anyone the government believes to be a gang member — which the government is famously pretty bad at determining with accuracy.
I could speculate that maybe if enough people are denied work permits for these reasons, and therefore can’t apply for renewals, the backlog might actually decrease. But I don’t want to make that a serious argument, because, as with the new green card policy, we don’t know how many people are actually going to be denied once this goes into effect. Indeed, since this is only a draft regulation, it’s possible that the grounds for denial will be scaled back some by the time the rule is finalized.
Once both rules are officially on the books, though, the backlog might turn into a veritable backforest.
