05/27/2026
Last Friday (pre-holiday weekend), USCIS announced a new policy declaring that adjustment of status will be granted only in "extraordinary circumstances" and that consular processing abroad is the default path to a green card. I wanted to give it a few days before commenting. McKinney Immigration Law does not jump to chime in on this Administration's daily rage bait.
To our clients and everyone watching this space: this memo is wrong; I would say laughingly wrong if it was a laughing matter. It is not. It is yet another paper tiger from a weak & cruel Administration. A memo is not a regulation or statute; it is not a binding precedent from a federal court. It is xenophobic fan fiction. And it will ultimately fail.
Why? Because the memo is inconsistent with the Immigration and Nationality Act (aka the law). Section 245 of the INA has, since 1952, authorized noncitizens who were inspected and admitted or paroled to adjust status inside the United States when they meet the statutory criteria. Congress has revisited and expanded that framework repeatedly — including §245(i) and §245(k) — precisely because adjustment of status is meant to be a real, available path, not a rarity.
It is inconsistent with the regulations at 8 CFR §245, which implement that statute and treat adjustment as a standard form of relief processed in the ordinary course.
And it is inconsistent with more than seventy years of agency practice, BIA precedent, and federal court decisions.
Calling adjustment "extraordinary" does not make it so. An agency cannot rewrite a statute by press release or policy memo. That is a dictatorship and not a constitutional democracy.
Our guidance to clients has not changed. We are preparing applications, assembling evidence, and moving cases forward exactly as we did the day before this announcement. If USCIS denies a properly filed application on the basis of this nonsense, we are prepared to litigate, including through APA challenges to both the policy and any denial that rests on it.
Panic is exactly what bad policy depends on. Don't give it that.
You can read the agency's release here:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services today announced a new policy memo reiterating the fact that, consistent with long-standing immigration law and immigration court decisions, aliens seeking adjustment of status must do so through consular processing via the Department of State outside of the....
