How I-ARC Helped a NYT Reporter Expose the DACA Mail Delay

Lawyers and journalists have a connection besides being members of two of the world’s most maligned professions.

For reporters seeking to humanize the impact of immigration policy, they need help from lawyers to illuminate the stories of their clients. When a network of lawyers realizes that multiple clients have been swept up in the same government injustice, that becomes a breaking story. I-ARC helped spark my scoop.

In the first week of November 2017, weeks after the window for recipients to renew their DACA status had closed, I was scrolling through Facebook. Camille Mackler had posted something unsettling. Clients in the New York area had sent their DACA renewals on time to the “lockbox” in Chicago, but they had gotten lost in the mail and not been delivered. When the applications did reach the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, it was past the deadline. They were rejected.

I asked Camille to survey her burgeoning I-ARC membership – formed nine months earlier with #NoBanJFK – to track down as many similar cases as possible in the New York area. I was the Metro immigration reporter for The New York Times then, and I knew that editors liked large numbers to show the magnitude of a problem. Camille put out an announcement on the I-ARC list-serv. I was on deadline and needed information within a day. She got quick responses, and she put me in touch with lawyers at several different organizations, large ones like The Legal Aid Society and community ones like African Services Together. The cases were heartbreaking. DACA recipients were checking the U.S. Postal Service app for receipts, despite sending their applications in well before the deadline. The applications just stalled in Chicago for days – or in the crucial hours before the deadline -- and then it was too late. 

At first, it seemed like a small group, about 38 people in the New York area. But within hours, the lawyer network heard of cases in Chicago. It grew to 75 people affected, and that was enough to give my story its punch. I quoted Camille, then the director of legal initiatives for the New York Immigration Coalition: “You can’t put the burden on the applicant to ensure the government agencies did their job,” she said in my article. “Can you imagine if the I.R.S. didn’t pick up their mail for two weeks and you get a penalty because of it? 

That touched off a week of outrage when USCIS first refused to accept responsibility for the government’s compounded errors. Not only had the mail delivery failed, but the private courier contractor had also failed to pick up the applications from the postal service mailbox. As a result, hundreds of DACA recipients’ lives were uprooted. They lost jobs, some moved back home and others into the shadows. A few brave ones figured they had nothing to lose by speaking to The New York Times, most with only a first name.

At this time, my story was kicking up a lot of internal strife at USCIS and the Department of Homeland Security. I kept calling the agency daily, pointing out the damning details I had learned from my reporting. And the numbers started growing daily, to some 900 people affected. Then a week after my first story, in a stunning reversal, USCIS said that the people who could show proof of the mail delay could resubmit their DACA applications. In January 2018, the government released the total from the mail delay debacle. It turned out to be at least 1,900 people affected.

Camille, again, in The Times: “The fact that that many individuals were affected shows that the deadline they imposed — which we always said was too short and too arbitrary — was too short even for the government to perform its functions properly.”

When a government doesn’t function properly, journalists must hold officials accountable. Lawyers can help them do so by giving them access to the stories that change policy, if not lives. 

By LIZ ROBBINS, immigration journalist and teacher
Follow Liz online at www.bylizrobbins.com or on Twitter @bylizrobbins