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 Taryn Druge, 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.
The answer to every simple question in our immigration system is: There’s a form for that! Frequently, the answer to more complex questions is: There’s a stack of forms for that! These forms are provided by the immigration authorities, for the use of applicants for immigration benefits, and are updated occasionally to reflect changes in law and policy.
These form updates are usually quite ho-hum. USCIS issues a notice stating that a form has been updated, and gives immigrants (and their lawyers) a grace period during which both the old version of the form and the new version will be accepted.
In early March, the new administrative decided to Reinvent the Paradigm by issuing a large number of new form versions. These new form versions – which included big ones, like the application for a green card – were virtually identical to the old forms, other than removing language concerning “other gender identity.” But – and this is the key – the old forms were invalid as of the date of issuance of the new forms. No grace period, no transition. What happens if you mailed the form yesterday, and it’s still in transit? Well, it’s invalid today.
This maneuver released a live ferret into the office of every immigration lawyer in the country. We had to stop application packets en route to the post office, because we quite properly feared that the applications would be rejected (or, worse, denied) for failure to provide the correct form version.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) hit the roof, quite properly, over this, and filed a lawsuit. USCIS replied to the lawsuit by saying (1) “[W]hile no definite grace period is being provided, USCIS will exercise its discretion to not reject previous versions of forms that are submitted for a reasonable period after the new versions take effect” and then, (2) by adding a one-month grace period, retroactively, in response to the lawsuit being filed. Our reading of this is that the new political appointees at USCIS were simply not familiar with how the agency works, and so they didn’t think about the problem until someone sued them over it. Our sympathies go out to the poor AUSA who has to explain this chain of events to a grumpy federal judge.
The new one-month grace period has created needless problems – particularly for victims of crime, who will need to obtain new certifications from already overworked police departments and prosecutors – and was, in our view, needlessly stingy. Providing the usual three months of grace period would have allowed most pro se and represented applicants to complete the applications and file them, and would also have allowed the government to update its forms in response to its new policy directives.
As always, we are grateful for your questions and comments, and will do our best to respond.
