By Daniela Pierre-Bravo
(CNN) — Marco, 26, graduated from one of the country’s top medical schools last week. He found his calling after witnessing his grandmother battle cancer, and he sometimes worked up to 40 to 60 hours a week to afford his education.
That dream is now in jeopardy.
Marco is one of the over 500,000 active recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) – an Obama-era program temporarily shielding some immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation – who are granted a work permit they can renew every two years. He applied for his renewal in December 2025, his lawyer says, and still has not received it.
He joins a growing number of recipients who risk losing their work permits and falling out of status due to processing delays. (CNN agreed to use the pseudonym “Marco,” as he feared speaking to the media could jeopardize his renewal.)
“This is a dramatic increase in people dealing with incredibly long, and disruptive delays… we are seeing somewhere between a 400% and 1000% increase in processing times, based on our conversations with small businesses, large employers at roundtables and DACA recipients around the country,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, a bipartisan advocacy organization that works with more than 100 US employers on DACA policy. “And this did not happen in the first Trump term. This is quite different.”
Without his renewal, Marco can’t start his residency in anesthesiology this summer. He says that would delay him from paying off over $100,000 in student loans.
“It would ruin me,” he said.
The median wait time for renewals between October 1, 2025, and February 28, 2026, was about 70 days, up from a median of about 15 days in fiscal year 2025, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data. Immigration lawyers and advocates who spoke to CNN say most of their clients’ processing times are currently higher than four months.
The latest data from USCIS shows that nearly 25,600 renewal applications were pending in September 2025. No updated figures have been released, and no current data exists on the number of recipients who have lost their work permits despite filing within the agency’s strongly encouraged 120–150-day window.
The slowdown is happening amid the Trump administration’s push to reduce illegal immigration, and an even more dramatic reduction in legal immigration, according to Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
When asked whether recent changes to the DACA renewal process had contributed to longer processing times, USCIS did not directly address the question.
In a statement to CNN, USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler said: “Under the leadership of President Trump, USCIS is safeguarding the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens.”
Many people involved in the immigration system say system changes have led to longer wait times.
On April 28, USCIS announced an enhanced vetting process, requiring the re-submission of fingerprint-based background checks through an expanded FBI system, temporarily pausing immigration decisions, according to an internal memo viewed by CNN. Immigration lawyers like Dan Berger, who is also the founder of a DACA clinic at Cornell Law School and has knowledge of the memo, said “this can lead to longer processing times.”
Berger notes that as early as December, his office began seeing DACA recipients called in for fingerprints – reinstating a pre-pandemic practice that had been replaced by using biometrics already on file.
Critics of the DACA program argue the delays are warranted.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for limited immigration, said the current pace is