Effective today, air travelers who are permitted to travel to the United States despite the COVID-19 public health bans in place for Brazil, China, Iran, Ireland, the European Schengen Area, and the United Kingdom, are no longer limited to entering…
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled that the Department of Homeland Security may proceed with its long-planned termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan, vacating a lower court decision that had blocked…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a proposed regulation that seeks to broadly expand the collection and use of biometrics in the enforcement and administration of immigration laws. The rule would subject foreign nationals to periodic biometrics collection…
The Department of Homeland Security has submitted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a long-planned regulation to toughen H-1B eligibility criteria and impose new obligations on H-1B employers. OMB review is the next step toward implementing the regulation, which President Trump…
USCIS will implement a new fee schedule on October 2, 2020, and with it, new versions of several key employment-based immigration forms, including new editions of the Form I-129 nonimmigrant worker petition for H-1B, L-1, O-1 and other key nonimmigrant categories. The…
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) today announced that the agency will avert a much anticipated furlough of more than 13,000 employees through September 30, the end of FY 2020. The furlough had been scheduled to begin on August 30. According to…
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has issued policy guidance outlining the standards for adjudicating DACA requests and related applications for work or travel authorization. The guidance is being issued as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reconsiders the DACA program in…
The U.S. House of Representatives has unanimously passed an emergency stopgap bill that would expand the premium processing program at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in order to prevent around 13,000 agency employees from being furloughed on August 30. If passed…
According to the State Department’s September Visa Bulletin, cutoff dates for issuance of an immigrant visa will be as follows: EB-1: All countries except for China and India will remain current in September. China and India will advance by three weeks to…
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that due to COVID-19-related delays in the production of Employment Authorization Documents (EADs), certain foreign nationals may use an EAD approval notice to establish employment authorization during the I-9 verification process, even though such notices…