False Hopes: Over 100,000 Immigrant Youth Trapped in the SIJS Backlog

“False Hopes”: Over 100,000 Immigrant Youth Trapped in the SIJS Backlog is the result of a collaborative research project conducted by The End SIJS Backlog Coalition, a project of the National Immigration Project, and Tulane Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic. It is a follow-up to the End SIJS Backlog Coalition’s ground-breaking report, “Any Day They Could Deport Me”: Over 44,000 Immigrant Children Trapped in the SIJS Backlog. 

The report, based on never-before-seen data obtained from USCIS through FOIA litigation, details how federal actions have drastically increased the SIJS backlog over the past two years and highlights the first-hand stories of SIJS youth of how the growing backlog continues to impact their mental health, physical safety and ability to securely transition into adulthood. Since the publication of our initial report in 2021, the administrative landscape has shifted significantly including through the Biden administration’s implementation of a much-welcomed deferred action program for SIJS youth, the emergence of a worldwide backlog in December 2022 impacting SIJS youth from all countries, and the announcement in March 2023 of a new Department of State interpretation of visa caps. Major findings include that the government has been routinely violating the law in the length of time it takes to decide SIJS cases, impacting access to work authorization and protections from removal, and the breadth of the now world-wide impact of the SIJS backlog. The report also makes key recommendations, including the call for Congress to pass the amendments included in The Protect Vulnerable Immigrant Youth Act (S.1885/H.R. 4285) that would exempt thousands of SIJS youth from the employment-based visa caps, thereby ensuring SIJS youth can achieve the permanency in the United States that Congress intended.

To quantify the harms of the SIJS backlog, we obtained a dataset of more than 200,000 SIJS petitions after suing USCIS under the Freedom of Information Act. This is the first time that this data on the SIJS backlog has been made available to the public. Our report is based on findings from this data set, analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute, and from first-hand interviews of impacted youth conducted by Maria Huerta Rodriguez, and National Immigration Project interns.

Read the Press Release