A change in the regulations governing visas for religious workers will be helpful for the Archdiocese of Chicago, according to Olga Rojas, the archdiocese’s senior counsel for immigration.
“This does help, and we are very grateful to the administration,” Rojas said.
The change, announced Jan. 14, means that religious workers from other countries who are in the United States on an R-1 temporary visa will no longer have to spend a year in their home countries when their visas expire before applying for a new one.
The temporary visas are good for 2½ years, and can be renewed for another 2½ years before the worker must leave the country.
Workers on R-1 visas still will have to return to their home countries when their visas expire after five years, Rojas explained, but there is no longer any minimum time period.
“They could go for a month or for a week, on vacation or to see their families,” she said.
With shorter absences, they can return to their previous assignments with a minimum of disruption, she said.
The change was announced two days after Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, met with President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other officials at the White House.
“We are tremendously grateful for the administration’s work to address certain challenges facing foreign-born religious workers, their employers, and the American communities they serve,” said Archbishop Coakley and Bishop Brendan J. Cahill, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, said in a statement.
Rojas said that before hearing the news, she was planning to tell some of the priests and religious sisters who work in the archdiocese on R-1 visas that they would have to go home.
There are currently about 57 people on R-1 visas in the archdiocese, mostly priests ministering in parishes and religious sisters, she said.
The five-year maximum term of such visas did not present a problem until recently, she said. Priests and other religious workers who came to minister in parishes in the United States used to be able to apply for a different kind of visa, one that offered a path to permanent residency, and usually have it approved well before their five years ran out, Rojas said.
But a 2023 change in the way such visas were allocated created a major backlog, and now the wait to get such a visa is estimated at about 30 years, she said, adding that there are about 300,000 people in line for the 9,940 visas that are available each year.
This year, the first people who were caught in the backlog are set to have their temporary visas expire.
“We are very grateful to the administration for this,” Rojas said. “The administration fixed a regulation, which was within their power.”
Congress would have to change the law for more complete solutions such as making more permanent visas available for religious workers, or dispensing entirely with the requirement that workers leave the country when their visas expire, she explained.
A bill introduced in Congress last year, the Religious Workers Protection Act, would allow religious workers to continue to extend their R-1 visas until they can apply for a visa for permanent residency without having to leave the country, and allow them to change employers during that time period.
That would mean, for example, that a priest ministering in the Archdiocese of Chicago could move to a new diocese without losing their place in line, something that is impossible now, Rojas said.
The bill has been assigned to the Senate judiciary committee, but it has not yet had a committee hearing.