Insights & Updates on EB-1A Green Card and U.S. Immigration

The system that underpins most employer-sponsored green cards in the United States has not been substantially rewritten since George W. Bush's first term. That is now poised to change. On September 16, 2026, Business Standard reported that the U.S. Department of Labor has moved ahead with plans to overhaul the PERM labour certification process. This, in turn, is likely to potentially bring the most significant changes to the employer-sponsored green card system in more than two decades. As always our EB-1A consultants have presented a detailed breakdown on the changes in PERM rule and what it could mean for the green card aspirants.

New York City is once again at the center of a legal battle over immigration policy. On September 14, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that the city had filed a federal lawsuit challenging a new "public charge" rule from the Department of Homeland Security: a rule that could reshape how immigration officers decide who is allowed to obtain a green card in America.

On the night of September 14, 2026, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the District of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing its new rule limiting F-1 students, J-1 exchange visitors, and certain I visa holders to fixed periods of admission. This ruling was enacted just hours before the regulation was scheduled to take effect on September 15. The order effectively pressed pause on a policy change that had been finalized in July.

However, for an H-4 spouse, a delayed work permit renewal can quickly turn from paperwork difficulties into a genuine financial crisis. Even when a renewal application is already filed and pending, the person may have to stop working entirely the moment their existing employment authorization expires. This could happen regardless of how long USCIS takes to process the new one.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is receiving dramatically fewer applications than it used to. However, its backlog is bigger than it has ever been. According to the American Immigration Council's latest analysis, published September 11, 2026, pending cases at USCIS reached 12.1 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 which is the highest figure recorded since the Council's dataset begins in FY2016. As the Council put it plainly, this is "a trend that reflects a series of policy and process changes by the Trump administration intended on restricting immigration into the United States."

A long-weekend road trip to New Mexico turned into an unexpected lesson in immigration compliance for a group of Dallas-based F-1 students earlier this month. The account they shared online has since become a cautionary tale for OPT and STEM-OPT students across the country.

In a single evening of pointed social media posts, a federal watchdog delivered a blow to two major tech employers' ability to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. On September 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor confirmed it had suspended Cognizant's Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) filings, with Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito following up almost immediately to announce that IT company Cloudera's PERM filings had been suspended as well.

The legal tool known as a "continuance" has functioned as a safety valve inside America's overwhelmed immigration courts. Previously, this feature has provided extra time to find a lawyer, gather documents, or wait for a federal agency to finish processing an already-approved visa. According to a Guardian investigation published September 4, 2026, that safety valve is now being deliberately narrowed through a mandatory nationwide training that instructed judges, in the words of one presentation, that there is "no room to be kind; there is only urgency to make them leave, one way or the other."

On September 4, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security issued an interim final rule that narrows who automatically becomes a U.S. citizen at birth while simultaneously opening a new, voluntary path to permanent residency for the very children it excludes. It is the latest and most detailed move yet in the Trump administration's ongoing campaign to redraw the boundaries of the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause. Interestingly, this interim policy landed just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the president's original attempt to do so.

For years, a specific class of large employers in the United States has budgeted for a familiar cost on immigration petitions: an extra $4,000 on qualifying H-1B petitions and $4,500 on qualifying L-1 petitions. These used to be charged only when hiring someone new or when a worker switched employers. That narrow scope is about to disappear. Under a new Department of Homeland Security rule, the same fee will now apply even when nothing about the employment relationship changes at all. This shift has outsized consequences for the Indian IT and consulting firms that dominate H-1B sponsorship in America. As always, our EB-1A consultants have zoomed in on this important update.

Previously, an American parent applying for their child's first passport has faced a simple bureaucratic procedure: they needed to prove the child is theirs, and show a photo ID. That routine is now on the verge of a fundamental change. According to a Reuters exclusive published September 1, 2026, the U.S. State Department has drafted guidance that would, for the first time, require parents applying for their children's passports to produce documentary proof of their own citizenship or immigration status. This change is the clearest sign yet of how the Trump administration intends to enforce its latest attempt to narrow birthright citizenship.

For nearly nine months, tens of thousands of immigration applicants from dozens of countries have lived in a peculiar kind of limbo. Their cases were filed and fees were paid, sometimes even interviews attended, yet the processing was frozen indefinitely with no decision in sight. On August 28, 2026, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services confirmed that a federal court has once again ordered the agency to start moving those cases again, in what is now the second major judicial defeat for the policy in under three months.