Thursday 29 February 2024

Overview

On January 31, 2024, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a final rule to adjust certain immigration and naturalization benefit request fees which will come into effect on April 1, 2024. This final rule provides reduced fees for nonprofits and small employers (ie, those with 25 or fewer employees). It also offers a $50 discount for those who choose to file online over paper filing for eligible petitions and applications. Additional changes include but are not limited to, incorporating the biometric services fee into the main fee rather than requiring a separate fee (in most cases) and requiring separate filing fees for Form I-485, Form I-131 and Form I-765, regardless of whether they are filed together or not.

As a fee-funded federal agency, approximately 96% of USCIS’ funding is generated from filing fees. Therefore, after a comprehensive review, this final rule was made due to the determination that the current fees do not recover the full cost of providing adjudication and naturalization services. Alongside these fee increases will be revised forms which will also go into effect on April 1, 2024, and whilst the majority will have a grace period through June 3, 2024, Form I-129, I-129CW, I-140, I-600A and I-600 will not have a grace period. In determining which form and fees are correct, USCIS will default to the postmark date of the filing.

Update

The updated USCIS fee list is relevant to the specific USCIS petitions or applications LDI regularly submit. A full list of the new fees can be found on the USCIS website under the “New Fee Schedule Table” tab. Additionally, the fees for premium processing have now increased as of 26 February 2024 (see table for information), and the processing times for premium processing will change from 15 calendar days to 15 business days as of 1 April 2024.

LDI comments

With the increase of fees, we will be expecting USCIS to keep to their pledge to ‘continue improving’ their delivery of timely decisions and avoid future backlogs which they say were accumulated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with current processing times still high, particularly for cases which cannot benefit from premium processing (such as I-130 petitions), we do not anticipate processing to be any faster than the current service with the current fees.

In other related news, USCIS recently ‘upgraded’ the MyUSCIS attorney accounts, as they have been pushing for individuals to file more petitions online (and even reducing the fees for online petitions). MyUSCIS already had issues with attorney accounts being more limited in scope than applicant accounts, but this latest update has unfortunately resulted in numerous reports of missing data. This has caused a backlash from attorneys, some of who, are still are waiting to have their data restored. USCIS says the migration and updates should take several hours, but for those with a large volume of online cases it could be more than a day. At such an important time in the immigration season, with the H-1B registration period opening in less than one week, it does not seem sensible to have released an updated system which clearly had not been tried and tested adequately. We are continuing to monitor the situation, but if you require assistance, USCIS has released a FAQ with information.

Get in touch

If you have any questions regarding the above, contact your Laura Devine Immigration attorney or enquiries@lauradevine.com for further guidance and advice.