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

The 2027 diversity visa lottery will stay closed for now. On Thursday, October 29, 2026, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals paused a lower-court order that would have forced the State Department to open registration. The injunction had also required the agency to implement the program on a set timeline. The ruling came on the day the department had to announce its registration period, and days before the 55,000-visa lottery was due to open. Here our EB-1A consultants have dived into the current state of the diversity visa lottery.

For refugees who rebuilt their lives in the United States, it is natural to guess that a government letter saying their status might be revoked, would be the start of a legal fight. This week, a federal judge in Boston decided in favour of the refugees’ right over the legal battle. Here, our EB-1A consultants have dived into this important piece of news

The Labor Department’s plan to rewrite the rules for sponsoring foreign workers for green cards has cleared a major hurdle, but nothing about the process has changed yet. A proposed overhaul of the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program completed White House regulatory review on October 23 which the Business Standard reported on October 29. The proposal’s text is not public, and the existing rules remain in force. Business Standard describes the clearance as “a step towards changing the PERM framework.” However, it is not an immediate change to the green card process. Here our EB-1A consultants have presented the new details of the PERM overhaul.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, to reinstate immigration judges’ authority to temporarily postpone deportation cases. That leaves in place an agreement between President Donald Trump’s administration and Republican-governed Texas that bars the once-common practice. The tool is known as “administrative closure.” The ruling is procedural, but it affects a system with a backlog of millions of cases. Here, our EB-1A consultants have explained this important news and dived into the nitty-gritties of it.

Anyone upgrading a pending I-140 to premium processing now has a logistics question before a legal one: where does the envelope go? USCIS says it changed the filing location for Form I-907, Request for Premium Processing Service, on October 7, 2026. For EB-1A petitioners, a mis-addressed upgrade is an avoidable setback. As always, here, our EB-1A experts have elucidated this very problem every premium processing applicant is likely to face.

In August, a federal judge threw out a Trump administration policy that froze immigrant visas for people from 75 countries. Yet NPR reported on October 26, 2026 that many of those immigrants are still stuck abroad, with no visa in hand. Attorneys say the government is slow-walking their cases. The State Department says the matter is in litigation. Here, our EB-1A consultants have dived deep into this important news and dissected it from all the angles.

Applicants at several U.S. consulates are being handed detailed questions about where they will live, how they will earn a living, how they will pay for health care and what they own. Several immigration attorneys are suggesting that these questions are closely tied to the public charge policy. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) published a set of these questions on October 20, 2026.

On October 22, 2026, the State Department released the November 2026 Visa Bulletin. Manifest Law notes that family-based applicants saw “the biggest gains,” with F1, F2B, F3 and F4 final action dates advancing a full year for most countries. Murthy Law Firm offered a one-line summary: “Several employment-based and family-based cutoff dates advance, while others remain unchanged.” It is the second bulletin of fiscal year 2027. The State Department made its allocations based on demand received by October 5. Tune with us as our EB-1A consultants analyze and comment on the November visa bulletin.

The “final merits determination” is the last step in USCIS’s review of an initial EB-1A petition, and it has drawn a string of legal challenges. In January, a federal judge in Nebraska ruled that USCIS had unlawfully adopted it. Last month, a judge in the same district reached the opposite conclusion in Agarwal v. Miller, according to a report by Manifest Law on October 20, 2026. Here our EB1A consultants have analyzed and discussed these two contradictory legal verdicts and what they mean for the eb-1a green card applicants.

The foreign professionals who are waiting on employer-sponsored green cards, have to go through a mandatory first step of PERM application. It has become a long wait in its own right. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is taking an average of 336 days to review permanent labor certification (PERM) applications, and tens of thousands of prevailing wage requests are queued before that stage even begins. The numbers do not show a system in free fall. They do show how many separate waits are stacked end to end. Here, our EB-1A consultants have discussed in detail everything foreign professionals and H-1B applicants need to know about the long PERM wait.

On October 9, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the Justice Department’s top immigration appeals tribunal, issued a precedent decision that could change who gets a full hearing in U.S. immigration court. In Matter of B-S-A-N-, the Board told immigration judges to generally deny asylum applications from nationals of highly developed democracies. It also held that European Union citizens are “presumptively ineligible for a discretionary grant of asylum” (BIA, Matter of B-S-A-N-). Because the decision is a published precedent, it binds immigration judges nationwide. As always, here, our EB1A consultants have dived deep into this important news and all the nuances associated with the precedent.