By Anjali Sharma
WASHINGTON – The US Citizenship and Immigration Services data released on Monday showed that a proposal from the US President Donald Trump-led administration to stop US immigration officers from deferring to earlier approvals when H-1B and L-1 workers seek extensions falls most heavily on Indian professionals, accounted for 4 in 5 H-1B approvals for continuing employment.
USCIS had approved 399,000 H-1B petitions in fiscal 2024, and 71% were for beneficiaries born in India, its annual report to Congress stated.
The public comment period on the Department of Homeland Security proposal, “Removing Deference to Prior USCIS Determinations of Eligibility”, will end on November 13.
A notice in this regard was published in the Federal Register on October 14 under DHS Docket No. USCIS-2026-0529 and comments are accepted only through regulations.gov, media reported.
The rule would remove 8 CFR 214.1(c)(5) that requires officers to generally defer to a prior approval involving the same parties and facts unless there was a material error, a material change, or new adverse information.
It covers all Form I-129 petitions, including H-1B, L-1, O-1, TN, E and P workers. The current rule stays in force until a final rule takes effect.
Some 258,000 approvals for continuing employment, the category that includes extensions, about 203,000, or 79 per cent, went to Indian-born workers, media reports stated.
The DHS stated in the notice that H-1B petitions make up over 75 per cent of all Form I-129 filings.
It estimated that nearly 208,000 petitions a year would be affected, and that removing deference could raise the rate of requests for evidence by about 3 percentage points, or roughly 6,000 additional requests a year.
The notice highlighted that petitions receiving such requests took 64 days longer to process on average over the last four fiscal years, while the DHS put the added cost to petitioners at about $134,000 a year.
The department argued that the deference regulation and policy “effectively shift the burden from the petitioner to the USCIS officer to justify departing from a prior approval.”
