The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) delayed the effective start date of the parole program for entrepreneurs until March 14, 2018. The DHS apparently will use the additional time to evaluate whether the proposed entrepreneur program should be eliminated altogether, in light of President...
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released a new version of the application to register permanent residence or adjust status (form I-485). Effective August 25, 2017, the USCIS will only accept the new version of the I-485, which lists an edition date of 06/25/2017...
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a smartphone app to assist those who are studying to take the civics portion of the naturalization test. The app, which is called USCIS: Civics Test Study Tools, is available for both Apple and Android devices. Background One...
As of Monday, July 24, 2017, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) resumed accepting requests for premium processing for certain cap-exempt H1B petitions. As explained in the USCIS news release:Premium processing will resume for petitions that may be exempt from the cap if the...
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) has been advised by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) that during April 2017, a number of PERM filings were inadvertently denied for failure to respond to audit requests, even though the employers had actually submitted timely responses via...
Charles Oppenheim, Chief of the Visa Control and Reporting Division for the U.S. Department of State (DOS), provides visa bulletin explanations and predictions nearly every month. The update this month for the August 2017 Visa Bulletin includes both some short-term predictions and some predictions for...
In a brief, unsigned Opinion today, the United States Supreme Court allowed a lower court’s restrictions on the Trump Administration’s travel ban on six Muslim-majority countries to remain in place. The Supreme Court had previously allowed parts of the travel ban to go into effect,...
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division is reinstating its policy of issuing opinion letters upon request to provide guidance to employers and employees on the Fair Labor Standards Act and other U.S. labor laws. Per a June 27, 2017 DOL announcement,...
In a decision published June 7, 2017, an administrative law judge (ALJ) in the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer (OCAHO) fined a staffing company $276,000 for various substantive violations related to its employees' I-9 forms. The violations included failure to prepare I-9s, failure...
On Thursday, July 14, 2017, a federal district court judge issued a preliminary injunction, preventing the Trump Administration from imposing the travel ban on those who have "…grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins of persons in the United States." This expands...
