The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman (CIS Ombudsman) invites you to participate in a joint webinar with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on the Humanitarian, Adjustment, Removing Conditions, and Travel Documents (HART) Service Center’s one-year anniversary on Tuesday, April 30 from 2 to 2:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
During the webinar, CIS Ombudsman staff will engage in a dialogue with USCIS representatives to discuss HART Service Center operations at the one-year mark.
Topics will include:
- An overview of the HART Service Center’s purpose and virtual structure;
- The form types that the HART Service Center adjudicates;
- HART Service Center’s hiring, onboarding, and training efforts in its first year.
During the webinar, participants will be able to submit questions and comments.
Why this is important
USCIS has stated that, after reviewing its processing times, it enhanced its focus on humanitarian-based benefits. As a result, the agency established the HART Service Center last year with the goal of improving the quality and efficiency of USCIS’ humanitarian caseload processing. In its first year, the HART Service Center focused on staffing and training while also completing adjudications.
In the CIS Ombudsman’s 2023 Annual Report to Congress, we examined USCIS’ backlogs in the article titled “Backlogs in the Long Term: 2022 in Review” and made a number of recommendations to USCIS on how to improve operations and address processing and policy issues that are some of the agency’s largest challenges.
