USCIS to Resume Deferring to Prior Determinations of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Petitions

Effective April 27, 2021, USCIS announced that it will once again defer to prior determinations of eligibility in requests for extensions of petition validity, so long as the petitions involve the same parties and facts of the case. This policy is a return to USCIS’s 2004 deference policy, and rescinds the 2017 Trump-era policy that prohibited USCIS adjudicators from deferring to prior petition approvals, even if the facts and circumstances of the case had not changed. The reinstatement of the pre-2017 policy is expected to reduce the number of RFEs (requests for evidence) for nonimmigrant petitioners and speed up processing times for extension requests, although it will take time to see the practical impact of the policy on USCIS adjudications.