(NewsNation) — Kavier Medero arrived in the United States searching for a fresh start, but as one of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers living in the U.S. but not currently qualified to work, the Venezuelan native has already hit a roadblock to his American dreams.
Medero’s hearing with the Executive Office For Immigration Review is not scheduled until 2027, leaving him with limited options for self-sustainability due to the fact that his immigration status, like many others, prohibits him from applying for a work permit.
Currently living in a city-run shelter in Chicago, Medero and his family face eviction in just two weeks. He understands that more than anything, he needs work to secure permanent housing.
The shelter provides his family with food and a place to sleep, but the food quality and assistance they receive are often lacking. Forms that arrived at the shelter from the Chicago Department of Human Services were not given to him for two weeks and others staying at the facility say that workers who don’t speak Spanish are less than helpful.
His circumstances have forced him to panhandle on the streets, asking strangers for help.
“I don’t want food, I don’t want to ask for money,” Medero told NewsNation through a translator. “What I want is the chance to get a (work) permit so I can work and make my own money.”
Like Medero, Leonardo Pérez Suárez has been staying at the American Islamic College shelter on Chicago’s north side since arriving from Cuba in January. In his home country, Pérez Suárez was an educated professional capable of doing “higher-level” work, he told NewsNation.
Pérez Suárez spent months working his way across several South American countries en route to the southern border. He says he was threatened by the cartel, hid from police after escaping from a refugee center in Panama and was forced to come up with cash to pay local officials and police in order to keep moving his family closer to a new life.
But with no immigration hearing scheduled until 2026, Pérez Suárez, the father of two — including a month-old infant — has limited options without a work permit. Like most migrants, Pérez Suárez wants to work and doesn’t want to ask for money from strangers.
“I will do anything,” Pérez Suárez told NewsNation through a translator. “I will clean the snow. I don’t need a permit to do that. But I will work. I will do any kind of work … I just need a chance.”
Cost, red tape slows work permits
The Department of Homeland Security announced last fall that it would provide Temporary Protective Status to 470,000 Venezuelan migrants who arrived before July 31, 2023. Because of their TPS designation, they would be given 18 months to apply for work authorization while they waited for their request for asylum to be heard.
However, Homeland Security said that migrants from Venezuela and other countries in crisis who arrived after the July deadline and who do not establish a legal basis for remaining in the U.S. would be sent back to their home country.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas extended the period for migrants to apply for work permits due to “extraordinary” conditions that prevent them from returning to their home country.
How long migrants must wait for authorization depends on whether they received temporary protection or if were paroled when they crossed the border. Those entering the country at the southern border must either turn themselves over to border agents upon entry or can also register on the CBP One app, which has been developed by Customs and Border Protection.
Once registered, migrants can become eligible for work permits when their parole status is valid. But immigration officials said the entire process can take months — or even years.
To obtain a work permit, migrants are required to fill out an I-765 form, which is issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency announced in January that the filing fee of $410 will be increased to $470 if filed online and $520 if filed manually beginning in April.
The fee hike is the first of its kind since 2016 for federal agencies such as Homeland Security to meet their total operational costs, according to the filing website.
Ariel Brown, an attorney with the Immigration Legal Resource Center, said that there is no way for migrants to simply apply for a work permit once they arrive.
Their application must be tied to a pending immigration status application, Brown said. If paroled at the border, migrants can apply for a work permit, but often, parole is granted to migrants for as little as one day, Brown said. It all adds up to a “big problem,” Brown said.
“The vast majority of people coming to the U.S. from other countries want to legally work to support themselves and their families and be self-sufficient,” Brown told NewsNation. “But without an easy way to obtain employment authorization, many people are forced to find jobs that unfairly penalize them for lacking work authorization.”
Trying to expedite the permit process
In September, the Biden administration launched a pilot program in cities including Chicago designed to expedite the process of getting work permits to migrants who were paroled. Since then, clinics have been set up in cities to help newcomers navigate piles of immigration forms and legal authorizations.
In Denver, 4,500 to 5,000 people were eligible for expedited work permits, according to Yoli Casas, who founded the nonprofit organization ViVe Wellness, which works to find migrants housing and work opportunities after they arrive in Colorado from the border.
Casas says that the majority of migrants and asylum seekers her organization works with want to hold down jobs to support themselves and their families after leaving their home country for various reasons, including escaping violence and political corruption.
“I don’t know of anybody who just wants to come here and put their families through all of this (hardship) just to do it,” Casas told NewsNation.
ViVe Wellness is one of several nonprofits in the city that connected migrants with attorneys who help newcomers work through the red tape of moving toward being work-eligible and in some cases, helping migrants get the work-permit fee waived.
A similar effort took place in New York, where Mayor Eric Adams launched a three-week “sprint” last fall to identify migrants who were already eligible to work. The city conducted in-depth surveys with nearly 40,000 asylum-seekers older than 18 in city shelters, the city announced. At the time, city officials had assessed more than 10,000 asylum seekers to determine if they were eligible to work in the U.S.
“For months, New York City has spoken with one voice, urging the federal government to put asylum seekers on the path to independence and ‘Let Them Work,’” Adams said in a statement released by the city at the time.
Brown said that a current bill being proposed in Congress, the Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act, would eliminate the waiting period. But short of that, she said, not much can be done.
Limited resources available
Although new arrivals of migrants by the busload have slowed significantly in Chicago, Ald. Andre Vasquez told NewsNation that finding ways to legally put migrants to work remains the biggest obstacle to finding a solution to the city’s migrant housing problem.
An effort conducted by The Resurrection Project in Chicago recently completed its first wave of workshops designed to help migrants become eligible to work. Over the past three months, attorneys working with the group screened 3,704 people to determine work eligibility for migrants who have received TPS designation or an employment enrollment document through parole.
Of those served, 1,362 have received work permits, the organization reported. The Resurrection Project is just beginning its second phase of clinics. But officials said of the 14,000 migrants still in city-run shelters, only 25% qualify for a work permit.
“The reality is that most recent arrivals do not qualify,” the organization said in a news release.
“If you had President Biden issue blanket work authorization — not just to new arrivals, but to undocumented folks who have been here for decades — they would get to work,” Vasquez said. “You would not be thinking about the financial ‘burden’ because these people would be making their own money, and they would actually be improving your economic status.”
Like other city leaders, Adams has called on Congress and other federal officials – including Biden – to provide authorization for migrants to work.
ILRC policy attorney Elizabeth Taufa argued Biden would likely never consider issuing an executive order, even if such a move was plausible. It would also require a huge influx of funding from Congress, which, she said is unlikely.
In addition to needing an underlying basis for issuing blanket work authorization, Biden would open himself up to more criticism from Republicans for his handling of the crisis while considerably slowing the processing of work authorization applications that’s already backlogged, Taufa said.