Enhance Service and Public Engagement

 In FY 2012, USCIS:

• Hosted 99 national engagements with more than 35,000 participants and 3,097 local engagements with more than 162,000 participants.
• Provided live assistance to more than 5 million callers through our USCIS Contact Center. The USCIS Contact Center received 12 million calls during the fiscal year, an average of 220,000 calls per week.
• Expanded E-Verify Self Check to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. This tool allows individuals to check for themselves whether they are employment authorized online.
• Launched E-Verify Listens, a platform on IdeaScale.com that allows the public to submit, discuss, refine and vote on ideas to improve the E-Verify system.
• Enhanced My Case Status and e-request e-services, resulting in a 45% increase in usage of these self-service options.
• Conducted more than 40 mobile events during which USCIS personnel traveled to provide information and services directly to remote and underserved immigrant populations.
• Ensured continuous public access to policy memoranda and regulations published in the Federal Register through greater use of the Web and social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. 

• Heightened awareness of our commitment to protect vulnerable populations, especially through our key role in the DHS Blue Campaign to combat human trafficking. Efforts included:

• Training and information sessions held at four field locations for agency personnel, stakeholders, and state and local law enforcement agencies.
• Events involving members of Congress and representatives from academia, healthcare organizations, first responders, faith-based organizations, state and local governments, the federal government, law enforcement, and the public and private sectors.

• Broadened multilingual services and outreach by:

• Hosting our popular quarterly Spanish-language “Enlace” sessions and, in February, launching Jiao Liu, a Chinese-language engagement series.
• Launching an online Multilingual Resource Center that offers access in 23 languages to application process information, certain documents, and answers to frequently asked questions.

• Processed an estimated 135,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and advanced engagement and transparency through improvements that cut our FOIA backlog by 70 percent from the prior year, to 10,700 requests.
• Provided information and training to almost 200 congressional staff from USCIS, the Department of State’s Consular Affairs Bureau, other DHS components, and the Executive Office of Immigration Review as part of the most successful annual Congressional Immigration Conference to date. Also maintained ongoing timely response to the high volume of constituent inquiries made through Congressional offices.
• Developed and added 175 form templates to our long-term project to catalog forms templates. The project, started in March 2012, now contains more than 5,000 catalogued templates.

• Conducted a new evaluation survey within the Asylum Division using the American Customer Satisfaction Index.  The results showed that the satisfaction rating for the Asylum program was significantly higher than the overall rating for the federal government in 2012.