By Stephen Dinan

The Washington Times

The government expects so many applications for President Obama’s new deportation amnesty that it’s seeking a contractor just to open the new mail and enter the forms into the system, with plans to operate two shifts from 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. every workday to keep up with the anticipated workload.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency charged with approving the applications, expects more than 800,000 applications in just the first two and a half months, or a 70 percent surge compared to last year’s total intake for the entire agency. Over the first 18 or so months, the agency will process more than 4 million pieces of mail related to the larger part of the new amnesty, according to contracting documents.

All applications must be opened in the presence of two workers, one with “secret” security clearance, in order to maintain integrity of the applications, and mail may need to be X-rayed for security reasons, the documents show.

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“USCIS is building the additional capacity needed to begin accepting requests for upcoming immigration initiatives,” the agency said in a statement to The Washington Times. “USCIS is on pace to have several hundred employees on board and trained by mid-May, which will ensure every case processed by USCIS receives a thorough, case-by-case review under our guidelines.”

But one former USCIS executive testified to Congress last week that the agency is going to be overwhelmed by the volume of applications and the truncated approval process.

“It’s going to be hard to tell how much fraud there is,” said Luke Bellocchi, a former deputy ombudsman for USCIS, as he testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week.

He said the agency is likely to use “abbreviated” criminal records checks that won’t delve too deeply into applicants’ backgrounds, and said the 2012 amnesty — known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — which was a test run for the broader amnesty Mr. Obama announced last year, accepted “pretty much any kind of documentation” to establish their identity.

That could be an even bigger problem for the new amnesty, known as DAPA — or Deferred Action for Parental Accountability — which applies to illegal immigrants who arrived as adults and who could have committed crimes in their home countries that wouldn’t show up on the abbreviated criminal checks.

The administration says it is confident in its ability to make a case-by-case decision on each application, and says it expects half of the 3.85 million people eligible for the new amnesty to apply once the application period opens in the middle of May.

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