The agency also clarified that such wide-scale lapses in employment authorization and EAD validity would occur because of no fault of the applicants, but rather as a result of on-going USCIS processing delays.
The Biden administration's border policies, historic expansion of TPS, and abuse of parole play a significant role in stunting the agency's ability to manage its workload. While USCIS has taken measures to address processing times, such as developing and opening the Humanitarian, Adjustment, Removing Conditions, and Travel Documents Service Center, the "Majority of actions address only the symptoms and not the root causes of backlogs themselves", reported the USCIS Ombudsman to Congress in its 2023 annual report.
The Biden administration's expansion of work authorization eligibility to hundreds of thousands of aliens who are inadmissible to the United States on an annual basis has kept processing times historically high, even while USCIS has reassigned officers to address priority workloads and worked "Diligently" to hire more staff.
In its automatic EAD extension announcement, DHS reported a significant spike in the number of EAD applications received by USCIS in 2023.
As of February 2024, the total number of pending EAD applications stood at approximately 1.4 million applications, which "Continues to pose a challenge for USCIS and also impacts processing times for renewal EAD applications eligible for automatic extensions because of the limited amount of USCIS resources that can be allocated to those case types".
While officials from the USCIS Asylum Division have attributed the administration's expansive use of prosecutorial discretion to cancel large numbers of cases in immigration court as a significant factor in the increase of affirmative asylum filings, the USCIS Ombudsman specifically highlighted the Biden administration's expansive use of parole as a factor.
The USCIS Ombudsman's report also emphasized the "Increased demand" for TPS as a significant challenge for USCIS, stating, "Processing work authorization for these populations in itself is a never-ending task for the agency." The USCIS Ombudsman noted that this growing population means "That the agency carries a larger and more complex workload with each new designation or extension".
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