USCIS Quietly Ends Program to Shield Workers Reporting Abuse

US Citizenship and Immigration Services is sunsetting a Biden-era program designed to encourage undocumented workers to speak out on labor violations, signaling the Trump administration won’t prioritize that aspect of enforcement even as it ramps up workplace raids.

The Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program was among the raft of policies and programs overturned in the days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a person familiar with the matter. In the months since, the Department of Homeland Security subagency responsible for adjudicating immigration benefits stopped processing applications, the person said.

Under DALE, undocumented workers involved in a state or federal labor investigation could apply to USCIS for four years of deferred action from deportation and temporary work authorization. But the protection is discretionary, and already the agency has terminated the status of a handful of workers at the request of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the person, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the program.

The cancellation of DALE occurred without much fanfare. USCIS archived a webpage with information about the program on Jan. 24, and released draft revisions in May for a form for deferred immigration action that removed an option for “Labor Investigation-Based” protection.

Ending the program is unlikely to make a meaningful impact on the administration’s deportation goals, as only about 7,700 people had been granted DALE status as of October 2024, according to a January statement from the Biden DHS to media outlets. That’s a tiny fraction of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the US, according to DHS statistics, but the change may hinder labor enforcement against employers of those workers, who are often vulnerable to bad actors due to their undocumented status.

“A lot of the most dangerous workplaces in the country, or a lot of the workplaces in the country where you see high instances of wage theft or safety violations, also look to hire the most vulnerable workers who won’t speak up,” said former Occupational Safety and Health Administration senior policy adviser Debbie Berkowitz. “Those workers often have immigration issues. They don’t want to speak up and raise their head if the company’s then going to just call ICE and have them be deported.”

USCIS didn’t respond to requests for comment. ICE didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

No New Applications

Though immigrant groups, unions, and attorneys said they haven’t received any official notice about the cancellation of DALE, many have ceased filing new applications out of fear that USCIS might refer applicants to ICE.

Program recipients must first submit a range of personal information to the agency, including their full name, address, and immigration status.

“While DHS and USCIS have not officially announced a cancellation of the program, most worker centers and community-based organizations have decided not to promote it among their members,” according to University of Illinois, Chicago professor Xochitl Bada, who’s written about the DALE program.

Attorneys and advocates described a mad dash to fill out applications around the time of the presidential election before hitting the brakes in late November, when the 60-day average processing time for applications would have stretched into the early days of the new Trump administration.

“Once we started feeling a little less confident about the election, we held off on filing any new applications after November,” said Nicole Gorney, an attorney at the California-based VIDAS Legal Services group, which received a state grant to help farmworkers apply for the program.

Many DALE applications filed before the inauguration remain in limbo, attorneys said, although a handful have been approved by ICE, which considers applications for workers already facing removal proceedings.

It remains unclear whether protections already granted to certain workers will be revoked, representatives of those workers told Bloomberg Law.

But Ted Chiappari, an immigration lawyer at Duane Morris LLP, said many DALE recipients are fearful about their status. Rather than being codified in regulation, the program relies on prosecutorial discretion from DHS that could be easily reversed.

“They are very much exposed,” Chiappari said. “They could very easily be identified and located.”

Enforcement Challenges

The apparent end of DALE means that undocumented workers will feel less emboldened to speak out about workplace abuses, posing a challenge for state and federal agencies tasked with enforcing labor laws, observers said.

Yvonne Medrano, an attorney at Bet Tzedek Legal Services, said the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has already had a chilling effect.

“People don’t want to come forward,” she said. “We’re very worried that wage theft is going to increase and go unaddressed because workers are fearful, and rightly so.”

That fear poses challenges for OSHA investigators, Berkowitz said.

“Lowbrow companies, who look the other way with who they hire and who make sure they hire the most vulnerable workers—they know who they’re hiring—will be able to get away with cutting corners on safety and maybe even wages,” she said.

Paul DeCamp, who led the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division during the George W. Bush administration, said that while the DALE rollback will have “some degree of a reduction” in worker complaints and DOL enforcement, the agency has tools to continue carrying out its mission. He said the DOL should encourage workers to share information with the agency through advocacy or faith-based groups or via anonymous channels.

“There will always be some fear,” DeCamp, now an attorney at Epstein Becker & Green P.C., said. “But I think the tried and true method that workers have used quite a bit in recent years is to work through intermediaries to present information to the department. For workers who are at great risk of being deported, that may be the best we can do in the current administration.”