Two rules issued by the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that restricted work permits for asylum seekers are invalid, ruled a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last week.
The rules, both issued in June 2020, affected the ability of asylum seekers to secure employment authorization documents. The first did away with an earlier regulation that required United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to process work authorization applications within 30 days after receipt. Notably, the DHS summary of this rule's pros and cons included a lengthy section on the quantitative costs of scrapping the 30-day processing timeline (including lost productivity costs to U.S. companies and lost wages for asylum seekers), but said that quantitative benefits were "not estimated."
