U.S. citizens and others with legal immigration status have been applying to the program on behalf of possible migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
A U.S. migrant sponsorship program with 30,000 monthly spots has received over 1.5 million applications in just a few months.
U.S. citizens and others with legal immigration status have been applying to the program on behalf of possible migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela but the high volume of applications is overwhelming the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to internal documents obtained by CBS News show.
The program will allow a monthly cap of 30,000 migrants from the listed countries to come to the U.S. if sponsored by a U.S. citizen, according to the USCIS. Once here they will be eligible to stay for two years, and are authorized to have a work visa during that time, the USCIS said.
The documents obtained by CBS News showed that on average there were 12,000 applications being received by the agency each day. Due to the monthly cap and the high volume of applications, the documents said only three days' worth of applications are processed each month.
The USCIS announced an update on Thursday to the process by which they review applications due to the higher-than-expected volume of applications. The new system is half randomized and half based on the oldest applications in a “first-in, first-out method,” according to the USCIS update.
So far under this program, over 100,000 migrants have come to the U.S. through a sponsor, though there are hundreds of thousands of pending cases for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, CBS News reported.
