U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is trying to approve as many employment-based green card applications as it can before the annual deadline of September 30, 2022 (the end of the fiscal year).
Primarily due to COVID-19 restrictions, approximately 140,000 family-based visa numbers went unused last fiscal year. As a result, these unused visa numbers were rolled over to this year’s employment-based visa number allocation; meaning, twice as many employment-based green cards are available this year.
USCIS and the Department of State (DOS) are primarily dealing with processing challenges and backlogs due to restraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other issues.
What are USCIS and DOS doing in order to appropriately issue all available employment-based visas and hit the 280,000 limit this year? Among other things, the agencies are:
Prioritizing processing and adjudication of employment-based adjustment applications at all locations;
Prioritizing adjudication of immigrant visa petitions (I-140s) to focus on beneficiaries who are or will be current this year;
Providing overtime and supplemental USCIS staff to support the employment-based applications;
Initiating an aggressive hiring and training plan for new staff;
Waiving interviews and reusing biometrics, where possible;
Redistributing cases to match workloads with resources;
Establishing a dedicated mailing address for requests from those who wish to transfer their pending cases to a...
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