Immigration updates - October 4, 2020

Key Updates

Presidential Bill H.R 8337. President recently signed H.R. 8337 Bill, which will fund the government and address USCIS’s budget shortfall. The bill expands premium processing service to other categories of Immigration like Employment Authorization Document (EAD), Extensions or Change of status (e.g. H-4 to F-1), and few others. It will increase the premium processing fee from $1,440 to $2,500 for H-1B and L-1 applicants. There will be a fee of $1,750 for EAD and change of status requests for F, J and other Visas. It also increases processing time from 2 weeks to 4 weeks or longer. But the USCIS is yet to provide further guidelines on how they will implement the new process.

Injunction of Fee Increase. California Dist. Court granted an injunction against DHS on implementation of new fee rule effective October 2, 2020 (new USCIS fee rule). Therefore, DHS adheres to the injunction and will not increase fee while injunction is in effect. Its a tremendous relief for people applying for Citizenship/Naturalization, Adjustment of Status, etc.

Limited Injunction on temporary suspension of certain immigrants into USA. Court granted an injunction on temporary suspension of certain immigrants into US (H-1B and others). But the benefit is only available to plaintiffs who sought the injunction against the DHS. Some of the plaintiffs are Technet, National Association of Manufactures and few others. This is not a nationwide injunction and employees of such companies/associations can make use of this injunction.

Stringent enforcement of Affidavit of Support. USCIS is going to publish a new rule which would make sponsors of immigrant petitioners (I-864) accountable for their attestations on affidavit of support. Furthermore, petitioners who have received means tested public benefits within the last 36 months of submitting the I-864 form need to be backed by a joint sponsor who has not received such benefits.

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Next: We have recently posted an article on questions we get frequently on I-485 Filing. You may be interested in that article too.

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