BCIS Director Makes Speedier Processing Top Priority

In an interview with Government Executive, BCIS director Eduardo Aguirre said he's "taken the first steps toward reducing a massive and long-standing backlog of immigration benefits applications." Aguirre said his main priority is to reduce wait times on immigration benefit applications to no more than 6 months by the end of 2006. The agency is conducting research in order increase its efficiency and significantly reduce wait times, and the BCIS will be increasing its investments in technology, Aguirre said.

"We have a long, long way to go before we get to the level of technology that we need to be able to function as a world class operation,” Aguirre said. "We are having to do more manual work than we should. Much of the technology we have right now is several generations behind what the state-of-the-art is in the commercial world.”

The agency will rely on $500 million of congressionally appropriated funding to research technology systems that will reduce processing times, which ballooned since the Sept 11 attacks to a point where applicants for US citizenship now may wait a year or more before receiving a response from the immigration bureau.