This sponsored column is by Law Office of James Montana PLLC. All questions about it should be directed to James Montana, Esq., Janice Chen, Esq., and Victoria Khaydar, Esq., practicing attorneys at The Law Office of James Montana PLLC, an immigration-focused law firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. The legal information given here is general in nature. If you want legal advice, contact us for an appointment.
USCIS administers immigration benefits. In the time-honored tradition of government agencies since the days of Ur and Uruk, USCIS uses forms to collect, store, and interpret information. Immigrants complete these forms in order to obtain benefits. Most U.S. citizens have no idea what reams of paperwork these forms require. An ordinary green card application is comprised of ninety-seven pages of bare forms, which typically are supported by several hundred pages of supporting documents.
In better times, forms are a necessary evil. In the times we actually live in, forms are just another weapon with which to thwack your political opponents.
In the second iteration of the Trump Administration, USCIS has discovered a new, extremely petty way to make immigrants’ lives more difficult – by releasing new form versions which make utterly minute changes, and then decrees that yesterday’s official version is obsolete as of today.
The Office of Management and Budget, by the way, requires that all government forms have an ‘edition date’ and an ‘expiration date.’ USCIS evades this neatly by making the expiration date purely notional – the form can be valid after the expiration date, and it can be decreed obsolete at any time before or after the expiration date. (The edition date is notional, too – in the first months of the Trump Administration, USCIS persistently released forms backdated to January 20, 2025, seemingly just for the inaugural vibes.) The forms altered in the last two weeks are highlighted below.
- Form G-28. Four pages, stating that a lawyer represents you.
- Form G-28. Four more pages, stating that the same lawyer represents your spouse.
- Form I-130. A twelve-page biographical survey of you, the U.S. citizen.
- Form I-130A. A six-page biographical survey of your spouse.
- Form I-131. A fourteen-page request for permission to travel while the government thinks about whether to grant the green card application.
- Form I-485. A twenty-four pager. This is the green card application itself. It repeats all of the biographical detail from Forms I-130 and I-130A.
- Form I-693. A fourteen-page list of certifications concerning your health and fitness. (No, your family doctor can’t do it for you – you have to go to someone called a Designated Civil Surgeon.)
- Form I-765. A seven-page request for a work permit while the government thinks about whether to grant your green card application.
- Form I-864. A twelve-page contract in which you (the U.S. citizen) promise to repay the government for welfare benefits, if your spouse draws on them, and in which you further promise to keep your spouse above the poverty line.
Those forms have to be updated periodically to incorporate changes in policy. Here, there were just two small updates. Form I-864 was updated to add the possibility of a credit check. Form I-485 was updated to add a question about whether the green card applicant has ever received “means-tested benefits” – or, rather, to deal with the obvious retroactivity problem, whether the green card applicant has received means-tested benefits on or after September 18, 2026. (What’s a means-tested public benefit, you ask? USCIS does not say so in the instructions, and, if you bury deep in the policy manual, you’ll find out that a means-tested benefit is a benefit, provided by the public, upon a testing of means.)
These relatively small changes do not justify the mass rejection of forms which will predictably and certainly follow a sudden change. Even if these changes were large enough to justify the ensuing administrative chaos, there is no reason why USCIS could not have had a grace period during which both versions of the form were accepted, as the agency habitually did until recently. USCIS simply does not care about the deleterious effects of its policy decisions – at best. At worst, chaos is the unstated goal.
Check the form edition dates directly on the USCIS website, or, better yet, trust competent counsel to do it for you.
