Illinois Youth: Aging Out

By: Anik Bhattacharjee


Ritisha Debnath, a 17-year-old senior at Schaumburg High School, has played tennis since she was a kid. She spent years practicing with her father before joining her high school's team, continuing with the sport to this day. Her family moved around the world -before settling in Schaumburg, Illinois, where she has lived since the third grade. At 21, she may lose the legal right to remain in the country where she has spent most of her school years. 

Debnath is one of an estimated 250,000 “Documented Dreamers” nationwide, a term for children who entered the U.S. legally as dependents of long-term visa holders (commonly H-1B or L-1 workers). They are heavily concentrated in districts like Illinois’s 8th. Home to one of the Midwest’s largest South Asian populations, this Chicago-area district is a corporate corridor built on H-1B labor.  Even while raised and educated in American schools, Debnath and others like her will lose their legal status the moment they turn 21. This consequence is the result of a decades-long green card backlog that the district’s own representative, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), has spent years trying to fix in Congress. 

Children of H-1B visa holders and other long-term nonimmigrant workers typically live in the U.S. on H-4 dependent status, derived entirely from and expiring alongside their parents' primary nonimmigrant status. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a person is only considered a “child” for immigration purposes if they are unmarried and under 21. Once they turn 21, they must independently secure a new legal status to avoid becoming undocumented.  

Turning 21 does not trigger automatic removal by immigration authorities. It does, however, strip a Documented Dreamer of the status they have held since childhood, unless they have separately secured one of their own. Statuses most commonly sought out are F-1 student visas timed carefully around college enrollment, or an H-1B through the employment lottery (which is far from guaranteed). Without one, they begin accruing unlawful presence and are typically advised to leave the country voluntarily before that accrual triggers a reentry ban. Their parents, still waiting in the same backlog, are not citizens either. This means that these families are not choosing between American and foreign citizenship so much as between two forms of confusing legal status. 

Congress passed the Child Status Protection Act in 2002 to prevent processing delays from causing children to “age out,” but the law does not fully protect children whose parents are still waiting in employment-based green card backlogs (as those kids cannot lock in their age until a visa number is actually available to them).  The problem intensified on August 15, 2025, when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services enacted a policy changing how the age-lock calculation works, raising the odds that backlogged dependents age out before their family’s priority date turns current. 

Colleges often weigh H-4 dependents the same way they weigh international applicants for financial aid purposes, since neither holds the citizenship or permanent residency the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) requires. This has raised the stakes for Debnath’s college applications.

"For my college list, obviously I wanted to focus on a few reach, target, and safety schools," Debnath said. "But more importantly, I know I won't qualify for FAFSA, so I've been looking at [schools] that offer a lot of scholarship money to international students… a lot of other scholarships are limited to citizens only. So I think the money thing has played a role in my college list just because of my status here."

One of Debnath's friends, a year ahead of her and in the same situation, was accepted this past year to the University of Illinois Chicago and several other schools, though some classmates saw it as underwhelming for such a strong student. "Even the most basic schools have really high expectations for students like us," Debnath said, "because you're competing against a much bigger pool of applicants and not just people in your class. On top of that, [colleges are] a lot more expensive for international students in general."

Krishnamoorthi has represented Illinois’s 8th District, which includes Schaumburg, since 2017. He has co-led the America's CHILDREN Act alongside Representatives such as Deborah Ross (D-NC) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), bipartisan legislation reintroduced in the 119th Congress on September 19, 2025. The legislation would end aging-out for dependents caught in the backlog and let them retain their original priority date. Krishnamoorthi gave up his House seat to run for U.S. Senate this year, but lost the March 17, 2026, Democratic primary to Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton. He will leave Congress in January 2027 without having passed the act. 

"This is something that the Congressman has been a co-lead on," said Vikas Nagarajan, Legislative Assistant to Krishnamoorthi. "We partnered with Deborah Ross from North Carolina, and she's been the main sponsor of the bill. She'll continue to be the main sponsor, because she'll continue to be in Congress next year." Krishnamoorthi's office said the bill remains a priority despite years of inaction. "Unfortunately, we don't control the majority, we don't control the floor, and while it's a bipartisan bill with significant support, we don't think there's enough votes to get it over the floor of the House right now," Nagarajan said. "We're hoping to explore how things look in the next Congress, and finding more bipartisan champions on the Senate side would help."

The green-card backlog is most severe for applicants born in India, who received roughly 71 percent of H-1B visas issued in fiscal year 2024 and face the longest wait time of any nationality for a green card. This backlog is so severe that in May 2026, the State Department announced that India had already exhausted its entire annual allotment of EB-2 green cards for the fiscal year. No further visas will be issued to Indian EB-2 applicants until October. Following India, China faces the second longest backlog with wait times ranging from four to six years. 

Past attempts to fix the green card backlog, like the EAGLE Act, failed because both political parties opposed them. Lawmakers feared that letting more people from India and China get green cards would block people from all other countries. Illinois’s 8th District is a plausible concentration point for these nationalities, with roughly 14 percent of its inhabitants being Asian Americans (among the highest shares of any Illinois congressional district). Within Schaumburg alone, employers including Zurich American Insurance, Cognizant, and Tata Consultancy Services filed hundreds of H-1B labor applications in 2025.

The America's CHILDREN Act remains pending, and the August 2025 rule change narrowed protections families like Debnath's once depended on. Krishnamoorthi's office says the act will outlast his time in Congress, as Ross will continue as its main sponsor. For Illinois-8’s own Documented Dreamers, the question is not who leads the bill next but whether it moves before Debnath and the classmates counting down beside her, turn 21.

Works Cited:


Interview with Ritisha Debnath, August 18, 2026, PRIMARY SOURCE

Interview with Vikas Nagarajan, Legislative Assistant, Office of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, August 20, 2026, PRIMARY SOURCE