More than a million people may die while waiting for their 'green card' due to delays by immigration authorities

The waiting times to obtain a

that ensures permanent residence thanks to the sponsorship of a relative who already lives in the United States have lengthened so much in recent months due to delays aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic that up to 1.6 million people they may die before obtaining permission to emigrate, according to the Los Angeles Times on Thursday.

Milap Kashipara, who had been waiting 16 years to join her brothers in the United States, finally got her

in 2019. She went to the American consulate in Mumbai (India) and handed in her papers;

he was due to hear back in April 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic got in the way.

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In the last 30 years there has been no significant reform of the immigration system and the high demand has meant that applications for visas, residences and naturalizations have grown faster than the federal authorities have the capacity to process.

The guidelines of the Government of Donald Trump further exacerbated the delays in these services and in the immigration courts, since they required more rigorous and therefore slower verifications.

The coronavirus pandemic ended up saturating the system.

“Wait times are increasing even though politics is moving in the right direction [with the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House in 2021], because it is not moving as fast as the demand for these services increases” explained David Bier, a researcher at the Cato Institute.

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Pending applications with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have increased by a third since the start of the pandemic.

Last March there were already 8.6 million cases awaiting resolution.

In addition, immigration courts have 1.8 million cases pending, 25% more than in October 2021, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) research center.

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Kashipara was in her early 30s when her sister filed paperwork to allow her to immigrate to the United States with her.

In 2020, at age 47, still in good health, she fell ill with COVID-19 while waiting for the consulate to call to notify her that her immigration petition had been accepted.

He died alone in a hospital room on May 1, 2022

, his sister, Ami Bhanvadia, told the Los Angeles Times.

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"It's a myth that it's easy for foreigners to come here," Bhanvadia explained, "my brother's family would have been here if the visa delays hadn't happened, and he would still be alive."

In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, he advocated giving his brother's relatives the opportunity to come.

"Families like my brother's are facing the worst outcome of COVID-19, are victims through no fault of their own, and are losing immigration benefits after waiting many years legally," he wrote.