USCIS released updated Policy Manual guidance on August 18, 2026, spelling out exactly how officers will apply the public charge ground of inadmissibility once the rescission of the 2022 rule takes effect on September 18, 2026. This is the practical follow-up to the rule change DHS announced in July, and it answers...
A proposed rule that would eliminate the 60-day grace period for nonimmigrant workers whose employment ends is now under review at the White House Office of Management and Budget, the last stop before a rule can be published for public comment. The rule, tracked under RIN 1615-AD22, would affect E-1, E-2, E-3,...
USCIS has widened a tool inside E-Verify that flags employees whose work authorization has been pulled, and the change means a lot more employees could now show up on it. E-Verify first rolled out the Status Change Report back in June 2025 as a narrow...
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has corrected its guidance for the R205(b) C20 Reciprocal Employment work permit category. The correction removes a recently published restriction that would have required applicants to already be employed by the company abroad. The C20 category remains an important LMIA-exempt option for qualifying multinational employers, academic...
USCIS is rolling out new editions of two of its most commonly filed forms, and this one comes with an unusually hard cutoff. Starting September 15, 2026, USCIS will only accept the 09/15/26 editions of Form I-539, Application to Extend/Change Nonimmigrant Status, and Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization. The current versions,...
An EB-1A extraordinary ability petition can satisfy every regulatory requirement on paper and still come back denied. That outcome catches a lot of applicants off guard, and the reason usually traces back to a single legal standard: Kazarian.
EB-1A has become an especially active filing option lately, particularly for...
A fee that used to apply only to new H-1B and L-1 petitions is about to reach a much larger group of filings. Homeland Security has finalized changes to the 9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee, closing an exemption that let companies avoid the charge simply by keeping an employee on staff...
An employee who enters the United States in L-1B status and later gets promoted into a managerial or executive role can often go through an L-1B to L-1A conversion. That conversion matters because of how differently the two categories are capped. L-1B status tops out at five years total, while L-1A status...
The visa bond requirement for certain B-1/B-2 applicants is no longer a temporary experiment. On August 3, 2026, the State Department published a final rule, effective immediately, that makes the visa bond program a permanent part of the visitor visa process. The original version of this program launched as a one-year pilot...
On July 8, 2026, the Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General announced a nationwide initiative to investigate fraud and strengthen compliance oversight across employment-based visa programs. This is a separate effort from Project Firewall, the H-1B enforcement initiative the Wage and Hour Division launched last September. The OIG's initiative casts a...
