Practitioners knew about the fee increase set for December 23 for some time. However, USCIS very abruptly and without prior warning, released and announced revised forms for most major applications and petitions on December 23 to include the new fees. Unlike the fee increase itself, no prior warning was given to practitioners or the public at large.
Further, the announcement said that USCIS would only accept the new forms effective immediately. Typically, when USCIS implements new forms, there’s a grace period of a month or two when they still accept the prior version.
As the fees appear only on the instructions to the forms rather than on the forms themselves, the urgency in releasing updated forms and mandating immediate usage is questionable at best.
When our national immigration bar association, AILA (American Immigration Lawyers’ Association), reached out to object to the lack of notice and to seek further information on implementation, USCIS apparently told them there would be some discretion in accepting older forms already signed. However, we would prefer more concrete guidance.
Firms such as ours which use Case Management Systems are waiting for vendors to update these systems to include the new forms – so we cannot quickly re-prepare case documents which have already been completed and are awaiting signature or return for filing.
This USCIS action as well as its timing immediately before a holiday weekend may be viewed by the more cynical among us as a calculated attempt to disrupt immigration filings and cause difficulty to stakeholders.