Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking whether or not recently announced cuts to USCIS staff will have an impact on K-1 Visa processing. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from The Hill, that's thehill.com, the article is titled: Trump Administration ousts over 400 DHS employees in ongoing workforce purge. 

Quoting directly: "A minimum of 50 employees were cut at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services while the DHS Science and Technology Directorate saw a 10-person reduction, the source said." 

So as you can see 50 employees have been fired from the USCIS. Now again, the question posed by this video specifically is, 'will this have an impact on Fiancé Visa processing? The K-1 Visa queue if you will specifically. Again, hard to say at this point. It would be an exercise in speculation for me to say that. That being said, look losing 50 staffers is going to have an impact on any operation. Again it depends on what sector in USCIS these people were working. Were they middle management? Were they actually adjudicators who actually adjudicate cases? I don't know and it's not mentioned particularly in that article, although I do urge those who are watching this video to go check out that article in more detail. That being said, I think it's safe to presume that any reduction in staff is going to have an overall negative impact on efficient processing in any organization. We saw during the first Administration - especially in the final two years of that Administration - that yeah, overall K-1 Visas were impacted by Trump's policies, most notably the de-prioritization of processing in terms of NVC processing as well as overall USCIS processing that we saw roughly in the last year of Mr. Trump's last Administration. 

That said I am cautiously optimistic that Mr. Trump is now kind of a little bit more nuanced in his thinking as regards US Immigration. As we've discussed in other videos - and I've been very hyperbolic in other videos - regarding illegal immigration especially at the border, that is something to be extremely concerned about and I'm very happy to see Mr. Trump and Mr. Holman and other folks within Customs and Border Protection taking affirmative steps to deal with the illegals streaming over the border; I would love to see the border closed up. But that said, again those kinds of stringent lines of thought regarding Immigration I'm not entirely certain will be applied in a family context in this Administration. Again, I might be being naïve, but I think that Mr. Trump might have learned some lessons from the first term and might now see that, hey going after legal immigrants - especially those who are the family members of American citizens - first of all might not be all that politic to begin with. Secondly really? Is that the mandate that Mr. Trump was voted in on? To go after legal immigration, to go after people who are the family members of Americans or Lawful Permanent Residents? Again, other people that have gone through the system legally. I don't think so. Again, his mandate is to go after illegal Immigration.

So whether or not these cuts will have an impact on K-1 processing remains to be seen but I do not personally believe the underlying policy is to go after K-1 Visa processing or to try to intentionally slow that down moving forward.